The Power of Seeking Therapy w/ Chris Mackenzie

In this episode, I interview Chris Mackenzie who has been the athletic trainer at Greendale High School for the past 23 years working with kids in all sports. Chris was the first person to speak openly about mental health with me and had a big impact on starting my own journey to dealing with mental health. We discuss some very vulnerable subjects around mental health in a marriage and the impact it can have. How stress can build and cause us to rely on ways to cope with it. As well as the evolving mental health of kids in school. 

Transcript

0:00:12 - Speaker 1
So the Milo principle. Milo was like some Greek guy and the idea was that Bull calf was born. And so he said. He reasoned look, i can carry this calf around now and every day I'm just going to get a little, you know, the calf would get a little bit bigger and I'll just be able to. You know, i'll just carry him, and every day he would carry him around the ring until you know. Legend has it he's carrying around this full grown bull because every day he could lift one pound more, one pound more. So it's the Milo principle. So I always used to love the pictures of that they would have, of people depicting that occurring. And yeah, they'd have this big, muscular, you know, bull on his shoulder. Did that really happen? Probably not, but you know. 

And now we call it progressive, progressive overload. Yeah, progressive overload. So very cool That's great. 

0:01:10 - Speaker 2
Well, all right. Welcome to another episode of Unturned Stones. Today, my guest is Chris McKenzie. Chris is the athletic trainer here at the Greendale High School and he has been for a while, including when I was here at high school. That's where I met him. Were you also a trainer for stuff? 

0:01:25 - Speaker 1
in middle school at all. Not at the middle school, but I did do a couple of the wrestling meets. So you know you might have seen me if you wrestled in at the middle school and I forget about what time that would have been. But yeah, definitely I've done some of the middle school stuff. 

0:01:41 - Speaker 2
Okay, because I did, and I thought I had met you prior to high school, because by the time I got to high school, i knew like I was more comfortable with you around and I had talked to you and come to you for injuries, because you're probably the very first person actually like adult that I talked to about mental health or anxiety and you were probably like the first person that really normalized it for me. 

I think you even helped me with the guy that's saying like seeking therapy really would be such a beneficial thing, and you like normalize this idea of therapy through me as well, because you know most people when they hear therapy, they always think something has to be so wrong to reach therapy. Yeah, and I feel like it's a great thing to talk to somebody that can help you get through some tough times, and that's kind of why I wanted to talk to you about this. Sure, i think you kind of helped open a big door for me and I feel like there's a lot that we can talk about here, which is why, yeah, i want to have you on today. 

0:02:31 - Speaker 1
Absolutely. Do you remember like that first time that we talked about it? 

0:02:38 - Speaker 2
I feel like I was down about something and I came to you for an injury issue and I was having like a relationship problem. 

0:02:45 - Speaker 1
So actually the way that I remember it and we did get into that right We did talk about relationship and what it was in my memory was we had a wrestling meet here and you lost a real close one and you had I don't want to call it a breakdown, but just seeing how you reacted to that loss and the pain that it seemed to cause, it was like there's something more going on here. Not that I think that was obvious to everyone, right, but there was definitely something that said maybe there was a perfectionism to you or you were putting too high an expectation, and just seeing how you reacted to that loss, i do remember that I wanted to ask you hey, you know about that. And then that's where we got into anxiety, and then that's where you were talking about. You know the anxiety that you felt in relationships at that time, you know, and about school and just about life in life in general. So it was. I definitely do remember that first conversation, though. 

0:04:02 - Speaker 2
Yeah, And if prior to that I really don't think I'd talk to anybody, because prior to that I kind of always just identified it as like nervousness and then I kind of like assumed that what I was going through, even through wrestling sometimes, was just like this nervousness I'd feel before wrestling matches but, I didn't know what to call it And, like I don't know how much, i identified the word anxiety before you really talked to me about it. 

And I was like oh you're right, okay, like, the reason my mode completely changes is not because I'm nervous, it's because I'm anxious, yeah, yeah. 

0:04:32 - Speaker 1
And you know it can't be difficult to separate what is normal and what is not right, because your body has that flight or fight response right And that's something that you do want activated before you're going to wrestle, before you're going to live, you know, but knowing what is normal for that, for the flight or flight, flight or fight response versus what is maybe unhealthy anxiety, you know, and I was kind of seeing you might have been having unhealthy anxiety at the time which, in which we were talking, you know, yes, did seem to be the case. 

0:05:08 - Speaker 2
And it took me a lot of years to figure out how I was expressing my anxiety through unhealthy ways, whether it was anger, whether it was like emotional outbursts, stuff like that. But yeah, yeah, so that's great. So I wanted to start the podcast by having you, because I'm interviewing you here. So this is about you And I want you to kind of tell the people a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your history, your family life, a little bit about you know, maybe, what your childhood was like and so on. 

0:05:34 - Speaker 1
Well, first off, you know, as, talking about my childhood, i would say I probably had a very ideal childhood, you know, very close to both my mom and my dad. You know my brother and I, but it had like normal brothers did, but we always had each other's back And, you know, in the family members that were around me, you know I never experienced some of the challenges that I see some go through. You know, working in a high school setting because, you know, in this setting you see kind of everything. So you know I don't like the word privilege but I like the word fortunate. I had a very fortunate childhood, you know. 

In regarding mental health, you know the closest thing I think I would have experienced to negative but negative maybe not the right word normal mental health struggles would have been, you know, anxiety, insecurity, things like that. And I yeah, you know I can't I do remember when I experienced, maybe my first bout of depression, but that wouldn't be too much later in life. You know when, perhaps I was I think I was in my 20s, maybe early 20s. 

0:06:59 - Speaker 2
So like when you're a child like you, you, you sounds like you have like a happy childhood in that sense Absolutely. And anytime that, like you might have been down, it was just more like normal life, not necessarily something you felt was long lasting. 

0:07:13 - Speaker 1
Maybe you lose a dog, or maybe you lose a game, maybe. maybe something didn't work out And that's. you know that sucks, but you know the normal amount of time maybe a few days is in the past, you know, and it's just part of who you were. Certainly nothing that that I felt like I dwelled on, you know. 

0:07:36 - Speaker 2
So would you say, like you're like losing a dog, like your parents probably taught you how to deal with that in a healthy way. 

0:07:43 - Speaker 1
Well, i, you know, i do remember that the first time we lost the dog my, it wasn't that we lost the dog, it was that one day my parents said, hey, we have to take a Linwood was the puppy's name. We have to take Linwood to Uncle Frank. And I never saw Linwood after that, you know. So I, i recently asked my parents so did we really take him to Uncle Frank's, you know? but according to them they did. I could still be just gullible, right, yeah, yeah. But you know I did. I did lose a puppy. One of our puppies did run away And I remember being pretty upset about that and looking for him every day and things like that, you know. And again that kind of bummed me out. But but again, nothing abnormal, nothing, nothing that you know, certainly nothing like people with depression would experience. 

0:08:34 - Speaker 2
Okay. Okay, And like getting into like your teens and kind of like in your twenties, like you said, you had some insecurity issues. Do you feel like that came with any like self-esteem issues when you were younger And like, is that something you felt like you transitioned through it all You know? 

0:08:52 - Speaker 1
I don't know if I had self-esteem. You know issues. I don't ever feel like I suffered from low self-esteem, insecurity though I would say yeah, i certainly did suffer from insecurities, first and foremost about my hearing right. You know, i wear hearing aids now and I've had needed hearing aids my whole life And growing up I had slight speech impediments, so it was harder for me to say things because I don't hear things the way that most did. And even when I had, even when I got hearing aids, i didn't have the skill to pronounce certain words and whatnot, you know. So that induced perhaps a little bit of shyness and quietness in me. I wasn't as talkative, i think, as most were, but likewise then I always just kind of felt different from other kids And I remember being very sensitive to any type of ribbing. 

You know, if someone said something, oh, maybe just making an innocent joke, i certainly took that, as you know, that was a big deal to me And it would upset me, you know, and I could go a couple of different directions. I could just cry or I could get in a fight, you know, and just. But again, the kids probably didn't mean it in a hurtful way. Maybe they did, But I shouldn't have let it bother me, and it would be something that I would eventually grow out of. 

0:10:32 - Speaker 2
I can relate to that because I feel like I was an emotionally sensitive kid But then I tried so hard to look guarded against being emotionally sensitive But I like, hated that I was, And when somebody would rib me I'd like deep down. I know it bothered me. 

0:10:49 - Speaker 1
I'd like. But you know that was something that I came to learn, that really a lot of my best friends were the ones that gave me the best thinkers right, and I learned, you know, i appreciated the humor and what they were saying. I could start to separate my sensitivity from it And eventually it became just like. It's just not that I invite people to make fun of my hearing all the time, but you know, it became something that, oh, you know, really this isn't a bad thing. It's not necessarily making me tougher per se, but it's making it fun. I can't change what I have or what I look like or what I sound or what I think I sound like, but when people rib me, it's funny to me. Now I enjoy that And I enjoy ribbing them back And I hope that they know if I rib them back, you know it's coming from a place of love, not trying to inflict pain. 

0:11:49 - Speaker 2
It's funny because I wish I knew the books that I could I'm going to reference here that I've seen excerpts from. but men almost get along by this form of ribbing that we have. 

0:12:00 - Speaker 1
Oh, absolutely. 

0:12:01 - Speaker 2
And it's embedded in us that's beyond just even our current social standards of how we live. It's something that men have always kind of had, and that's why any time you get a group of men together, they will naturally shoot this shit and kind of fuck with each other a little bit. 

We do that because it's just, That's how our friendships come out in a group setting And I feel like I would be in a friend group where everybody's ribbing each other, but in any one of those guys they hang out with them and visually and the ribbing is almost gone. 

0:12:29 - Speaker 1
Well, and you're absolutely right, And of course, a lot of the best singers against us come from ourselves as well, You know, like you know just kind of making fun of yourself And that's just kind of a more fun way to go through life. You're absolutely right. I think that that is a level that a lot of men communicate on, You know, and I just didn't realize that when I was younger And you know I look back that I have seen sensitive people in my life and I was like that is, I did used to understand that a lot better than I do now. Now it's like, hey, we're just having fun and you're included, right. 

0:13:11 - Speaker 2
Do you kind of remember when you grew out of it, or not grow out of it, but like learn to like see it differently, because it sounds like it was like a perspective shift that you went through. 

0:13:22 - Speaker 1
It was a process. You know. When I first got to high school, i was still pretty sensitive about it. As I got older, as I got closer to some of the other guys my age, i started to accept the ribbing more, started to participate in it more Certainly. As I got to college, it just became something that was second nature. And certainly now I mean to this day I laugh because I think one of the great things about being a guy is that we can still be immature, right, like you can still be a man and still have periods of immaturity where you're just off giggling about something as if you were in grade school, but you still have responsibilities and you still have to live up to those responsibilities. Right, and it's a lot of fun, and I love deer camp. Every year is like one of my favorite times of year because we get to be dumb guys. 

0:14:29 - Speaker 2
It's amazing how a weekend away with a guy is like that I'll come back and it could be a weekend of we're drinking entire weekend. So like you come back hungover, you know you're going to you stop like her out the whole weekend. It's going to take you a few days to recover. Yet like here, i'm like mentally calmer, i'm like I feel better, i'm happy for that week. I mean, the being tired could definitely go away earlier after like some of those weekends And they happen less and less as I've gotten older But it's like I miss them sometimes, like those just ribbing each other. It's not even the ribbing each other as much as just shooting the shit, having fun, like being immature with no guard. And I do think guys only get that once they're kind of by themselves on the group and everybody feels safe with everybody, and then they can let go And there's there's something special about that And that that would be something you're saying. 

0:15:16 - Speaker 1
Everybody feels safe with everybody. There is I still do get a, you know there's there's still like that natural shyness And I don't know if you experienced this, but there is sometimes that natural shyness that we get someone new in the group, You know it's like, oh, who's this guy? You know but, but pretty, you know, but but again. So the Milo principle Milo was like some Greek guy and the idea was that Bull calf was born. 

And so he said, he reasoned look, I can carry this calf around now and every day I'm just going to get a little, you know, the calf would get a little bit bigger and I'll just be able to. You know, I'll just carry him and every day he would carry him around the ring until, you know, legend has it, he's carrying around this full grown bull because every day he could lift one pound more, one pound more. So it's the Milo principle. So I always used to love the pictures of that they would have, of people depicting that occurring and yeah, they'd have this big, muscular, you know, bull on his shoulder. Did that really happen? Probably not, But you know. 

And now we call it progressive, progressive overload. Yeah, progressive overload. So very cool That's great. 

0:01:10 - Speaker 2
Well, all right. Welcome to another episode of Unturned Stones. Today, my guest is Chris McKenzie. Chris is the athletic trainer here at the Greendale High School and he has been for a while, including when I was here at high school. That's where I met him. Were you also a trainer for stuff? 

0:01:25 - Speaker 1
in middle school at all. Not at the middle school, but I did do a couple of the wrestling meets. So you know you might have seen me if you wrestled in at the middle school and I forget about what time that would have been. But yeah, definitely I've done some of the middle school stuff. 

0:01:41 - Speaker 2
Okay, because I did, and I thought I had met you prior to high school, because by the time I got to high school, i knew like I was more comfortable with you around and I had talked to you and come to you for injuries, because you're probably the very first person actually like adult that I talked to about mental health or anxiety and you were probably like the first person that really normalized it for me. 

I think you even helped me with the guy that's saying like seeking therapy really would be such a beneficial thing, and you like normalize this idea of therapy through me as well, because you know most people when they hear therapy, they always think something has to be so wrong to reach therapy. Yeah, and I feel like it's a great thing to talk to somebody that can help you get through some tough times, and that's kind of why I wanted to talk to you about this. Sure, i think you kind of helped open a big door for me and I feel like there's a lot that we can talk about here, which is why, yeah, i want to have you on today. 

0:02:31 - Speaker 1
Absolutely. Do you remember like that first time that we talked about it? 

0:02:38 - Speaker 2
I feel like I was down about something and I came to you for an injury issue and I was having like a relationship problem. 

0:02:45 - Speaker 1
So actually the way that I remember it and we did get into that right We did talk about relationship and what it was in my memory was we had a wrestling meet here and you lost a real close one and you had I don't want to call it a breakdown, but just seeing how you reacted to that loss and the pain that it seemed to cause, it was like there's something more going on here. Not that I think that was obvious to everyone, right, but there was definitely something that said maybe there was a perfectionism to you or you were putting too high an expectation, and just seeing how you reacted to that loss, i do remember that I wanted to ask you hey, you know about that. And then that's where we got into anxiety, and then that's where you were talking about. You know the anxiety that you felt in relationships at that time, you know, and about school and just about life in life in general. So it was. I definitely do remember that first conversation, though. 

0:04:02 - Speaker 2
Yeah, And if prior to that I really don't think I'd talk to anybody, because prior to that I kind of always just identified it as like nervousness and then I kind of like assumed that what I was going through, even through wrestling sometimes, was just like this nervousness I'd feel before wrestling matches but, I didn't know what to call it And, like I don't know how much, i identified the word anxiety before you really talked to me about it. 

And I was like oh you're right, okay, like, the reason my mode completely changes is not because I'm nervous, it's because I'm anxious, yeah, yeah. 

0:04:32 - Speaker 1
And you know it can't be difficult to separate what is normal and what is not right, because your body has that flight or fight response right And that's something that you do want activated before you're going to wrestle, before you're going to live, you know, but knowing what is normal for that, for the flight or flight, flight or fight response versus what is maybe unhealthy anxiety, you know, and I was kind of seeing you might have been having unhealthy anxiety at the time which, in which we were talking, you know, yes, did seem to be the case. 

0:05:08 - Speaker 2
And it took me a lot of years to figure out how I was expressing my anxiety through unhealthy ways, whether it was anger, whether it was like emotional outbursts, stuff like that. But yeah, yeah, so that's great. So I wanted to start the podcast by having you, because I'm interviewing you here. So this is about you And I want you to kind of tell the people a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your history, your family life, a little bit about you know, maybe, what your childhood was like and so on. 

0:05:34 - Speaker 1
Well, first off, you know, as, talking about my childhood, i would say I probably had a very ideal childhood, you know, very close to both my mom and my dad. You know my brother and I, but it had like normal brothers did, but we always had each other's back And, you know, in the family members that were around me, you know I never experienced some of the challenges that I see some go through. You know, working in a high school setting because, you know, in this setting you see kind of everything. So you know I don't like the word privilege but I like the word fortunate. I had a very fortunate childhood, you know. 

In regarding mental health, you know the closest thing I think I would have experienced to negative but negative maybe not the right word normal mental health struggles would have been, you know, anxiety, insecurity, things like that. And I yeah, you know I can't I do remember when I experienced, maybe my first bout of depression, but that wouldn't be too much later in life. You know when, perhaps I was I think I was in my 20s, maybe early 20s. 

0:06:59 - Speaker 2
So like when you're a child like you, you, you sounds like you have like a happy childhood in that sense Absolutely. And anytime that, like you might have been down, it was just more like normal life, not necessarily something you felt was long lasting. 

0:07:13 - Speaker 1
Maybe you lose a dog, or maybe you lose a game, maybe. maybe something didn't work out And that's. you know that sucks, but you know the normal amount of time maybe a few days is in the past, you know, and it's just part of who you were. Certainly nothing that that I felt like I dwelled on, you know. 

0:07:36 - Speaker 2
So would you say, like you're like losing a dog, like your parents probably taught you how to deal with that in a healthy way. 

0:07:43 - Speaker 1
Well, i, you know, i do remember that the first time we lost the dog my, it wasn't that we lost the dog, it was that one day my parents said, hey, we have to take a Linwood was the puppy's name. We have to take Linwood to Uncle Frank. And I never saw Linwood after that, you know. So I, i recently asked my parents so did we really take him to Uncle Frank's, you know? but according to them they did. I could still be just gullible, right, yeah, yeah. But you know I did. I did lose a puppy. One of our puppies did run away And I remember being pretty upset about that and looking for him every day and things like that, you know. And again that kind of bummed me out. But but again, nothing abnormal, nothing, nothing that you know, certainly nothing like people with depression would experience. 

0:08:34 - Speaker 2
Okay. Okay, And like getting into like your teens and kind of like in your twenties, like you said, you had some insecurity issues. Do you feel like that came with any like self-esteem issues when you were younger And like, is that something you felt like you transitioned through it all You know? 

0:08:52 - Speaker 1
I don't know if I had self-esteem. You know issues. I don't ever feel like I suffered from low self-esteem, insecurity though I would say yeah, i certainly did suffer from insecurities, first and foremost about my hearing right. You know, i wear hearing aids now and I've had needed hearing aids my whole life And growing up I had slight speech impediments, so it was harder for me to say things because I don't hear things the way that most did. And even when I had, even when I got hearing aids, i didn't have the skill to pronounce certain words and whatnot, you know. So that induced perhaps a little bit of shyness and quietness in me. I wasn't as talkative, i think, as most were, but likewise then I always just kind of felt different from other kids And I remember being very sensitive to any type of ribbing. 

You know, if someone said something, oh, maybe just making an innocent joke, i certainly took that, as you know, that was a big deal to me And it would upset me, you know, and I could go a couple of different directions. I could just cry or I could get in a fight, you know, and just. But again, the kids probably didn't mean it in a hurtful way. Maybe they did, But I shouldn't have let it bother me, and it would be something that I would eventually grow out of. 

0:10:32 - Speaker 2
I can relate to that because I feel like I was an emotionally sensitive kid But then I tried so hard to look guarded against being emotionally sensitive But I like, hated that I was, And when somebody would rib me I'd like deep down. I know it bothered me. 

0:10:49 - Speaker 1
I'd like. But you know that was something that I came to learn, that really a lot of my best friends were the ones that gave me the best thinkers right, and I learned, you know, i appreciated the humor and what they were saying. I could start to separate my sensitivity from it And eventually it became just like. It's just not that I invite people to make fun of my hearing all the time, but you know, it became something that, oh, you know, really this isn't a bad thing. It's not necessarily making me tougher per se, but it's making it fun. I can't change what I have or what I look like or what I sound or what I think I sound like, but when people rib me, it's funny to me. Now I enjoy that And I enjoy ribbing them back And I hope that they know if I rib them back, you know it's coming from a place of love, not trying to inflict pain. 

0:11:49 - Speaker 2
It's funny because I wish I knew the books that I could I'm going to reference here that I've seen excerpts from. but men almost get along by this form of ribbing that we have. 

0:12:00 - Speaker 1
Oh, absolutely. 

0:12:01 - Speaker 2
And it's embedded in us that's beyond just even our current social standards of how we live. It's something that men have always kind of had, and that's why any time you get a group of men together, they will naturally shoot this shit and kind of fuck with each other a little bit. 

We do that because it's just, That's how our friendships come out in a group setting And I feel like I would be in a friend group where everybody's ribbing each other, but in any one of those guys they hang out with them and visually and the ribbing is almost gone. 

0:12:29 - Speaker 1
Well, and you're absolutely right, And of course, a lot of the best singers against us come from ourselves as well, You know, like you know just kind of making fun of yourself And that's just kind of a more fun way to go through life. You're absolutely right. I think that that is a level that a lot of men communicate on, You know, and I just didn't realize that when I was younger And you know I look back that I have seen sensitive people in my life and I was like that is, I did used to understand that a lot better than I do now. Now it's like, hey, we're just having fun and you're included, right. 

0:13:11 - Speaker 2
Do you kind of remember when you grew out of it, or not grow out of it, but like learn to like see it differently, because it sounds like it was like a perspective shift that you went through. 

0:13:22 - Speaker 1
It was a process. You know. When I first got to high school, i was still pretty sensitive about it. As I got older, as I got closer to some of the other guys my age, i started to accept the ribbing more, started to participate in it more Certainly. As I got to college, it just became something that was second nature. And certainly now I mean to this day I laugh because I think one of the great things about being a guy is that we can still be immature, right, like you can still be a man and still have periods of immaturity where you're just off giggling about something as if you were in grade school, but you still have responsibilities and you still have to live up to those responsibilities. Right, and it's a lot of fun, and I love deer camp. Every year is like one of my favorite times of year because we get to be dumb guys. 

0:14:29 - Speaker 2
It's amazing how a weekend away with a guy is like that I'll come back and it could be a weekend of we're drinking entire weekend. So like you come back hungover, you know you're going to you stop like her out the whole weekend. It's going to take you a few days to recover. Yet like here, i'm like mentally calmer, i'm like I feel better, i'm happy for that week. I mean, the being tired could definitely go away earlier after like some of those weekends And they happen less and less as I've gotten older But it's like I miss them sometimes, like those just ribbing each other. It's not even the ribbing each other as much as just shooting the shit, having fun, like being immature with no guard. And I do think guys only get that once they're kind of by themselves on the group and everybody feels safe with everybody, and then they can let go And there's there's something special about that And that that would be something you're saying. 

0:15:16 - Speaker 1
Everybody feels safe with everybody. There is I still do get a, you know there's. There's still like that natural shyness And I don't know if you experienced this, but there is sometimes that natural shyness that we get someone new in the group, you know it's like, oh, who's this guy? You know but, but pretty, you know, but but again. Pretty soon they're incorporated into the space and you're having the same fun with them as anyone. 

0:15:40 - Speaker 2
So It's funny because I think I definitely feel that And I think every time I feel that, like that China's around somebody else, it's almost I just want their acceptance and approval. And as soon as you feel like okay, like they're cool, i feel like they accept me or approve me too, there's like I, i, i. That's, i feel, at least, the way I'll process sometimes meeting new people. If I'm like a little shy around them, it's almost like okay, did they accept me? or they approve me? Okay, cause maybe I'm like, i feel I'm a little off-kilter compared to most people. If I walk into a room and something like that, like, and once I feel that, then I feel like I'll open up. 

0:16:11 - Speaker 1
So yeah, Well, and, and I definitely you know, one of the one of the things is my high school experience, cause I grew up in Jacksonville, florida, and moved up here during my freshman year at high school, i did feel like a bit of an outsider, you know where. Okay, you know how am I going to fit into this group? Because I'm different And I felt different. Just because I spoke with an accent in those days, i had to had a Southern draw and almost always, anytime I said something to anyone, the first thing that would be repeated, you know, said, said back to me would be you're not from around here, are you, you know? and this would have been no, i'm from Florida, oh, what are you doing here? And so, but yeah, i, i definitely had that outsider sense and and then wanting to integrate myself in, Yeah, Do you do you feel like that shaped you a little bit, Like that having to integrate? 

0:17:00 - Speaker 2
Because I do feel like having to move around when I was young and like moving into a place where you're you weren't established at everybody, from literally being a baby up. like some people grow up in a small town and know everybody from their youth all the way through high school and graduation. 

0:17:14 - Speaker 1
You know, i never really put a lot of thought into how it shaped me just being, you know, an outsider when I was, you know, when we first moved up here, but but everything shapes you, right? Yeah, you know, you, you, you grow from your experiences and and and certainly certainly it did it did give me a you know kind of sense of, oh, i am not from around here, i am, you know, i, i've got to fit in more. 

0:17:42 - Speaker 2
So So like more on like the mental health side of it. So you don't necessarily remember having like too much of like mental health being a thing that you are aware of till maybe later on in your life. What, what kind of made it more impactful Like, maybe come to fruition more in your life. 

0:18:02 - Speaker 1
So the first time I can remember experiencing something that I would look back and say was depression. I would I wouldn't have known it at the time was shortly it was my first year working here And there was a. There was someone I was dating at that time And it was. It was a relationship I really wasn't ready for. You know, certainly, certainly. We probably had different views of what we wanted out of the relationship. 

You know, i was a young guy, i just wanted to hook up and have fun And here was someone I, I, i did like him, you know, whereas she was talking about marriage. You know, very shortly after, you know, after we had started dating And we did know each other through college, but eventually that that difference in expectation where it felt like I I certainly wasn't ready for what she wanted, and you know, i just kind of started withdrawing more and becoming less myself And eventually it would get to the point where you would try to break off the relationship And of course that was something I was terrible at right. Unfortunately, i didn't have to do that a lot either. It normally happened that other way, right, but but you know, it got to the point to where I just didn't want to engage with anyone. And you know, i remember, i remember when I decided that we were done, i probably didn't talk to anyone for about three days And I just remember feeling sick about it, you know, for a long time, and not wanting to talk to her, not wanting, you know just, and not wanting to talk to really anyone about it. You know, and I'd never really, you know I felt kind of ashamed how it ended. 

But but yeah, for probably for probably two months, i remember just not feeling like myself And, you know, getting out of normal routines that I'd had, you know, which included working out, which that didn't help. And then you know, i forget how I came out of it. You know I didn't seek out therapy or anything like that. I didn't, you know, use medication or anything. But then you know, just kind of feeling starting to feel like my old self again. But now I can look back on it and say, yeah, that was really in how. What led into that, more so than the process after, was how I started feeling detached and withdrawn. Prior to that, to me that was the entering of depression. 

0:21:04 - Speaker 2
Was there like? was there like a stress that you would constantly carry because maybe, like you didn't want? 

0:21:08 - Speaker 1
to make the relationship. Oh, absolutely, yeah. 

0:21:10 - Speaker 2
Because, like I felt that in past relationships and then I would like almost try to fight, like the depression of it and everything just felt so much harder, but it's only because I would feel like my mind was always carrying the stress of I don't want to break this girl's heart, i don't want to have to hurt somebody's feelings. 

0:21:25 - Speaker 1
And part of it was, you know, part of it for me was, you know, again, people oftentimes have a need to be liked and again, from an insecure place right Where I didn't want people to not like me, i didn't want her to not like me, so very insecure about the saying hey look, you know, this isn't working. You know, even if it's working for you, it's not working for me And that's not a place where we can continue from. But the insecurity of, oh, she's gonna hate me, you know. And I look back on it now and I say I would have been better off handling it a different way, but the insecurity at that time didn't let me, you know, and at that time in my life, you know, you don't necessarily think of yourself as insecure, right, you know you kind of think you got it all figured out, you know. I look back now and I was like, wow, how did I even get here? 

0:22:28 - Speaker 2
So, yeah, yeah, Do you feel like, like, with that insecurity, like, do you, we also like non-confrontational? Or do you feel like would you find yourself being confrontational, like when you needed? 

0:22:41 - Speaker 1
I can see where non-confrontational approach could be a measure of insecurity. But I also kind of see, you know, being confrontational being insecure in you know someone bringing different information or a different approach to you. Oh no, we have to do it my way, you know, you know. 

0:23:00 - Speaker 2
Even from like the point of view of you like. So the breakup it was mainly like you didn't. You didn't want to not be liked. It wasn't necessarily that you'd be worried about them blowing up in your face. Yeah correct. Like if they blow up in your face you weren't worried about that I would have been okay with that. You'd be like well, that's a character fault there now, Not on me. 

0:23:23 - Speaker 1
I wasn't worried about the confrontation more than I was, you know, about what she would think, what her friends would think. You know, and we had, you know, we had kind of this close-knit group of people that I knew her friends, she knew my friends, and not that things would be that disruptive, you know, but you still didn't want her friends. You know it was. It was the kind of I don't want to say narcissistic need to be liked, but it came from a need to be liked, right, and we're all traversing this like social atmosphere, like with life every day, and we were trying to have an image that we want to present to everybody. 

And it's narcissistic or not, You want to be the nice guy. but to be the nice guy, do you break up with someone, right, Yeah? 

0:24:11 - Speaker 2
yeah, so would you say. is that, like you're saying, like a lesson that you kind of learned, cause you say you would look back and you wish you would handle that differently? 

0:24:18 - Speaker 1
Oh absolutely. 

0:24:19 - Speaker 2
So you learned that you not being the nice guy is not going to always be the right way to go. Okay, was there other times in life that that kind of came out where you like had to? 

0:24:30 - Speaker 1
where I had to confront or had to break up. 

0:24:33 - Speaker 2
Well, not like learn like because of that situation and what you learned from that, that you made a different decision. 

0:24:39 - Speaker 1
Yeah, certainly, certainly. You know decisions I would make, you know, and with my wife right now I would be a reflection of that, whereas, like, i will tell people what I need. You know what is important to me, and you know, and that that came from a place of growth because you know, my wife and I would, early in our marriage, have a lot of difficulty. And so my first experience with therapy was when my wife so my wife was anorexic, and when I first met her she wouldn't have been an obvious anorexic. You wouldn't look at her and necessarily say, oh, there's something off with her. But her behaviors were completely that of an anorexic restriction over exercising, and in more restriction than over exercising. Right, she was a dog walker, so you wouldn't necessarily know that she was over exercising. But as our relationship progressed and she fell more into anorexia, she would get smaller, smaller and smaller. She would lose more weight. I wanna say that. I wanna say she got down to 65 pounds, right, and so, working with her parents we talked about, you know, she has been kind of, she had kind of been playing a system to keep from getting into treatment facilities where she would say she would tell her parents. You know, i called the intake nurse And you know they said they would call back And that would placate the parents, you know myself for a few weeks. And hey, whatever happened, well, they never called back or they said, you know, you kind of felt like you were playing a game And eventually, eventually it's like look, you know, there's not much more of this that she can do. How much longer until this becomes a threat to her life? And so we got her into therapy or we got her into a treatment facility And she did very well. She, i wanna say, spent six months in recovery, maybe seven months in recovery, and during that time, well, we got engaged and we had planned for the marriage. 

When we got back, and shortly after we got married, she started falling back into similar behavior patterns where she was starting to restrict, she was starting to try to avoid eating, try to avoid a number of things. And you know our relationship wasn't in a good point at that point because, of course, i was terrified of her becoming full-on anorexic again And I was not equipped to deal with that. And what was funny was, before becoming, before we started dating, my ideas of what dealing with anorexia or mental health disorders was like, my ideas of what it was like and what it was actually like were, you know, completely different. I thought that when we started dating and she talked about being anorexic, i thought this would be pretty easy to be. I mean, if she's just around me, that's going to be a big improvement, right, and you know, we, when she started to fall back into anorexia even though part of the treatment plan for her brought me out to Arizona in which we were to learn and practice skills, right, if there was a setback, how would we handle this? How would we work through food anxieties? How would we, you know, how would we help her maintain these skills? It was wonderful training And I learned so much from it. But even just that one week wasn't enough to prepare me for kind of the relapse. 

So as she started to relapse into those behaviors, i started to start to use utilized behaviors outside of those skills, right, and that started to bring us into conflict which put a big strain on the marriage. And Meg said, you know I was getting very angry, very angry, and you know I never would have thought I had a temper early in my life, like, okay, i get mad, but not uncontrolled. Where I was with Meg, i was kind of experiencing uncontrolled anger, never hitting anyone, never, but certainly I've hit things. And Meg said, you know, i think you might want to go to therapy for anger. I said, no, i don't need to go to therapy, You need therapy. If you went to therapy I wouldn't be so angry, right, you know? and I stuck with that line And I kept stuck sticking with that line And you know, again the fights, the fights didn't escalate, but maybe they became more frequent. 

And again, you know, it came from a place of me trying to keep her, you know, from continuing these anorexic behaviors. But you know I don't have that ability, right? Only she could do that. You know, my role was to be supportive, not controlling. And so one day, you know, i went up to go visit a friend up in Green Bay And I was texting her and I stopped getting texts back And I was like no, that's unusual. And so I was driving home that night And you know I tried calling, no answer. And I got home and she wasn't there, her car wasn't there And her dog wasn't there. We had three dogs at the time, but her dog that she had when she lived with her parents wasn't there And there was a note there and you know, explain that. You know, hey, we can't do this, i need to leave. 

And you know it was just kind of a very dark place And she would reach out. She said, i believe she said in the note I won't, you know, i'm not going to talk to you for at least a week, or maybe it was two. So no matter, trying to call her, trying to call her parents, you know, i was just kind of on my own for two weeks And when we did start talking again, and during that time, i mean, you know, i tried to keep appearances. You know I didn't, i was very ashamed about the separation, but I tried to keep appearances I kept on the face and told you, didn't really tell anyone, you know, didn't even tell my parents, didn't tell my brother, i didn't tell my best, you know, my best friends at the time, because it was kind of it felt shameful. 

And then finally started when the period that she had designated as no contact passed, we started talking And she had said, as one of the rules, you're going to have to go to therapy, you know. So you know, again, at that point I was still was pretty resistant. I mean, therapy was fine for other people, not for me, you know. Again, you know, i felt that if she wasn't having the problems that she was having, i wouldn't be having these problems. So why do I need therapy? So I went, i made an appointment with the therapist and you had sat down and, you know, talked, and it was amazing because the therapist helped me bring clarity right. The therapist wasn't giving me answers, but the therapist was showing me, showing me things, showing me how to think, and you know, and certainly she had insight that I would never have had, And so, but she helped me open my eyes to what I was dealing with And one of the things that she helped me realize was that, you know, i had plenty of skill to live my life, to live, you know, without the need for therapy, on my own, you know. 

But here I was dealing with something that I had no skill for. I didn't have the skill to live with someone with the mental illnesses that my wife had, and that my getting therapy wasn't necessarily a failure. You know, it was a place to learn, and so from that it became a much more active and willing participant in the therapy process And we did work on. You know we worked on. You know cognitive behavioral therapy right, we're working on recognizing what were my triggers to getting angry and why did I let myself get to that point? right, how can I recognize those triggers earlier And maybe employ different strategies about how to think about it or how to react to those triggers? Before you know, before you get to the point where you're yelling, you know you're losing yourself and yelling about dumb things, right, and you know. So working on those skills certainly helped. 

Working on you know how living with some, how living with someone that had a mental illness, how you can be supportive and understanding how what makes sense in your head doesn't necessarily make sense in their head. Right, and it really did. It really did make my life and Meg's life a lot better, and you know. So. From that I'm forever grateful. And then from there, you know, after I can't even remember how many sessions, but after a number of sessions where she was like my therapist was like you seem in a really good place and Meg had wanted to start rebuilding our relationship Again, we started to. 

We started to go to marriage counseling and, you know, working with the marriage counselor in that setting helped us communicate better together. You know where, instead of being, you know, two people with opposite goals. How can we make, how can we work to have similar goals and how do we communicate that? And then we're not perfect, of course, right, you know, but we certainly fight about things less frequently. We have just we have constructive discussions, and it is a much better place to be, so a lot more fun, i'll say that. 

There's so many things that, like my brain, wanted to touch on as you were talking there but there's this overarching arc there that like I wanna then like hit on pretty soon they're incorporated into the space and you're having the same fun with them as anyone, so It's funny because I think I definitely feel that And I think every time I feel that, like that China's around somebody else, it's almost I just want their acceptance and approval. 

0:15:49 - Speaker 2
And as soon as you feel like okay, like they're cool, i feel like they accept me or approve me too, there's like I, i, i. That's, i feel, at least, the way I'll process sometimes meeting new people. If I'm like a little shy around them, it's almost like okay, did they accept me? or they approve me? Okay, cause maybe I'm like, i feel I'm a little off-kilter compared to most people. If I walk into a room and something like that, like, and once I feel that, then I feel like I'll open up. 

0:16:11 - Speaker 1
So yeah, Well, and, and I definitely you know, one of the one of the things is my high school experience, cause I grew up in Jacksonville, florida, and moved up here during my freshman year at high school, i did feel like a bit of an outsider, you know where. Okay, you know how am I going to fit into this group? Because I'm different And I felt different. Just because I spoke with an accent in those days, i had to had a Southern draw and almost always, anytime I said something to anyone, the first thing that would be repeated, you know, said, said back to me would be you're not from around here, are you, you know? and this would have been no, i'm from Florida, oh, what are you doing here? And so, but yeah, i, i definitely had that outsider sense and and then wanting to integrate myself in, Yeah, Do you do you feel like that shaped you a little bit, Like that having to integrate? 

0:17:00 - Speaker 2
Because I do feel like having to move around when I was young and like moving into a place where you're you weren't established at everybody, from literally being a baby up. like some people grow up in a small town and know everybody from their youth all the way through high school and graduation. 

0:17:14 - Speaker 1
You know, i never really put a lot of thought into how it shaped me just being, you know, an outsider when I was, you know, when we first moved up here, but but everything shapes you, right? Yeah, you know, you, you, you grow from your experiences and and and certainly certainly it did it did give me a you know kind of sense of, oh, i am not from around here, i am, you know, i, i've got to fit in more. 

0:17:42 - Speaker 2
So So like more on like the mental health side of it. So you don't necessarily remember having like too much of like mental health being a thing that you are aware of till maybe later on in your life. What, what kind of made it more impactful Like, maybe come to fruition more in your life. 

0:18:02 - Speaker 1
So the first time I can remember experiencing something that I would look back and say was depression. I would I wouldn't have known it at the time was shortly it was my first year working here And there was a. There was someone I was dating at that time And it was. It was a relationship I really wasn't ready for. You know, certainly, certainly. We probably had different views of what we wanted out of the relationship. 

You know, i was a young guy, i just wanted to hook up and have fun And here was someone I, I, i did like him, you know, whereas she was talking about marriage. You know, very shortly after, you know, after we had started dating And we did know each other through college, but eventually that that difference in expectation where it felt like I I certainly wasn't ready for what she wanted, and you know, i just kind of started withdrawing more and becoming less myself And eventually it would get to the point where you would try to break off the relationship And of course that was something I was terrible at right. Unfortunately, i didn't have to do that a lot either. It normally happened that other way, right, but but you know, it got to the point to where I just didn't want to engage with anyone. And you know, i remember, i remember when I decided that we were done, i probably didn't talk to anyone for about three days And I just remember feeling sick about it, you know, for a long time, and not wanting to talk to her, not wanting, you know just, and not wanting to talk to really anyone about it. You know, and I'd never really, you know I felt kind of ashamed how it ended. 

But but yeah, for probably for probably two months, i remember just not feeling like myself And, you know, getting out of normal routines that I'd had, you know, which included working out, which that didn't help. And then you know, i forget how I came out of it. You know I didn't seek out therapy or anything like that. I didn't, you know, use medication or anything. But then you know, just kind of feeling starting to feel like my old self again. But now I can look back on it and say, yeah, that was really in how. What led into that, more so than the process after, was how I started feeling detached and withdrawn. Prior to that, to me that was the entering of depression. 

0:21:04 - Speaker 2
Was there like? was there like a stress that you would constantly carry because maybe, like you didn't want? 

0:21:08 - Speaker 1
to make the relationship. Oh, absolutely, yeah. 

0:21:10 - Speaker 2
Because, like I felt that in past relationships and then I would like almost try to fight, like the depression of it and everything just felt so much harder, but it's only because I would feel like my mind was always carrying the stress of I don't want to break this girl's heart, i don't want to have to hurt somebody's feelings. 

0:21:25 - Speaker 1
And part of it was, you know, part of it for me was, you know, again, people oftentimes have a need to be liked and again, from an insecure place right Where I didn't want people to not like me, i didn't want her to not like me, so very insecure about the saying hey look, you know, this isn't working. You know, even if it's working for you, it's not working for me And that's not a place where we can continue from. But the insecurity of, oh, she's gonna hate me, you know. And I look back on it now and I say I would have been better off handling it a different way, but the insecurity at that time didn't let me, you know, and at that time in my life, you know, you don't necessarily think of yourself as insecure, right, you know you kind of think you got it all figured out, you know. I look back now and I was like, wow, how did I even get here? 

0:22:28 - Speaker 2
So, yeah, yeah, Do you feel like, like, with that insecurity, like, do you, we also like non-confrontational? Or do you feel like would you find yourself being confrontational, like when you needed? 

0:22:41 - Speaker 1
I can see where non-confrontational approach could be a measure of insecurity. But I also kind of see, you know, being confrontational being insecure in you know someone bringing different information or a different approach to you. Oh no, we have to do it my way, you know, you know. 

0:23:00 - Speaker 2
Even from like the point of view of you like. So the breakup it was mainly like you didn't. You didn't want to not be liked. It wasn't necessarily that you'd be worried about them blowing up in your face. Yeah correct. Like if they blow up in your face you weren't worried about that I would have been okay with that. You'd be like well, that's a character fault there now, Not on me. 

0:23:23 - Speaker 1
I wasn't worried about the confrontation more than I was, you know, about what she would think, what her friends would think. You know, and we had, you know, we had kind of this close-knit group of people that I knew her friends, she knew my friends, and not that things would be that disruptive, you know, but you still didn't want her friends. You know it was. It was the kind of I don't want to say narcissistic need to be liked, but it came from a need to be liked, right, and we're all traversing this like social atmosphere, like with life every day, and we were trying to have an image that we want to present to everybody. 

And it's narcissistic or not, You want to be the nice guy. but to be the nice guy, do you break up with someone, right, Yeah? 

0:24:11 - Speaker 2
yeah, so would you say. is that, like you're saying, like a lesson that you kind of learned, cause you say you would look back and you wish you would handle that differently? 

0:24:18 - Speaker 1
Oh absolutely. 

0:24:19 - Speaker 2
So you learned that you not being the nice guy is not going to always be the right way to go. Okay, was there other times in life that that kind of came out where you like had to? 

0:24:30 - Speaker 1
where I had to confront or had to break up. 

0:24:33 - Speaker 2
Well, not like learn like because of that situation and what you learned from that, that you made a different decision. 

0:24:39 - Speaker 1
Yeah, certainly, certainly. You know decisions I would make, you know, and with my wife right now I would be a reflection of that, whereas, like, i will tell people what I need. You know what is important to me, and you know, and that that came from a place of growth because you know, my wife and I would, early in our marriage, have a lot of difficulty. And so my first experience with therapy was when my wife so my wife was anorexic, and when I first met her she wouldn't have been an obvious anorexic. You wouldn't look at her and necessarily say, oh, there's something off with her. But her behaviors were completely that of an anorexic restriction over exercising, and in more restriction than over exercising. Right, she was a dog walker, so you wouldn't necessarily know that she was over exercising. But as our relationship progressed and she fell more into anorexia, she would get smaller, smaller and smaller. She would lose more weight. I wanna say that. I wanna say she got down to 65 pounds, right, and so, working with her parents we talked about, you know, she has been kind of, she had kind of been playing a system to keep from getting into treatment facilities where she would say she would tell her parents. You know, i called the intake nurse And you know they said they would call back And that would placate the parents, you know myself for a few weeks. And hey, whatever happened, well, they never called back or they said, you know, you kind of felt like you were playing a game And eventually, eventually it's like look, you know, there's not much more of this that she can do. How much longer until this becomes a threat to her life? And so we got her into therapy or we got her into a treatment facility And she did very well. She, i wanna say, spent six months in recovery, maybe seven months in recovery, and during that time, well, we got engaged and we had planned for the marriage. 

When we got back, and shortly after we got married, she started falling back into similar behavior patterns where she was starting to restrict, she was starting to try to avoid eating, try to avoid a number of things. And you know our relationship wasn't in a good point at that point because, of course, i was terrified of her becoming full-on anorexic again And I was not equipped to deal with that. And what was funny was, before becoming, before we started dating, my ideas of what dealing with anorexia or mental health disorders was like, my ideas of what it was like and what it was actually like were, you know, completely different. I thought that when we started dating and she talked about being anorexic, i thought this would be pretty easy to be. I mean, if she's just around me, that's going to be a big improvement, right, and you know, we, when she started to fall back into anorexia even though part of the treatment plan for her brought me out to Arizona in which we were to learn and practice skills, right, if there was a setback, how would we handle this? How would we work through food anxieties? How would we, you know, how would we help her maintain these skills? It was wonderful training And I learned so much from it. But even just that one week wasn't enough to prepare me for kind of the relapse. 

So as she started to relapse into those behaviors, i started to start to use utilized behaviors outside of those skills, right, and that started to bring us into conflict which put a big strain on the marriage. And Meg said, you know I was getting very angry, very angry, and you know I never would have thought I had a temper early in my life, like, okay, i get mad, but not uncontrolled. Where I was with Meg, i was kind of experiencing uncontrolled anger, never hitting anyone, never, but certainly I've hit things. And Meg said, you know, i think you might want to go to therapy for anger. I said, no, i don't need to go to therapy, You need therapy. If you went to therapy I wouldn't be so angry, right, you know? and I stuck with that line And I kept stuck sticking with that line And you know, again the fights, the fights didn't escalate, but maybe they became more frequent. 

And again, you know, it came from a place of me trying to keep her, you know, from continuing these anorexic behaviors. But you know I don't have that ability, right? Only she could do that. You know, my role was to be supportive, not controlling. And so one day, you know, i went up to go visit a friend up in Green Bay And I was texting her and I stopped getting texts back And I was like no, that's unusual. And so I was driving home that night And you know I tried calling, no answer. And I got home and she wasn't there, her car wasn't there And her dog wasn't there. We had three dogs at the time, but her dog that she had when she lived with her parents wasn't there And there was a note there and you know, explain that. You know, hey, we can't do this, i need to leave. 

And you know it was just kind of a very dark place And she would reach out. She said, i believe she said in the note I won't, you know, i'm not going to talk to you for at least a week, or maybe it was two. So no matter, trying to call her, trying to call her parents, you know, i was just kind of on my own for two weeks And when we did start talking again, and during that time, i mean, you know, i tried to keep appearances. You know I didn't, i was very ashamed about the separation, but I tried to keep appearances I kept on the face and told you, didn't really tell anyone, you know, didn't even tell my parents, didn't tell my brother, i didn't tell my best, you know, my best friends at the time, because it was kind of it felt shameful. 

And then finally started when the period that she had designated as no contact passed, we started talking And she had said, as one of the rules, you're going to have to go to therapy, you know. So you know, again, at that point I was still was pretty resistant. I mean, therapy was fine for other people, not for me, you know. Again, you know, i felt that if she wasn't having the problems that she was having, i wouldn't be having these problems. So why do I need therapy? So I went, i made an appointment with the therapist and you had sat down and, you know, talked, and it was amazing because the therapist helped me bring clarity right. The therapist wasn't giving me answers, but the therapist was showing me, showing me things, showing me how to think, and you know, and certainly she had insight that I would never have had, And so, but she helped me open my eyes to what I was dealing with And one of the things that she helped me realize was that, you know, i had plenty of skill to live my life, to live, you know, without the need for therapy, on my own, you know. 

But here I was dealing with something that I had no skill for. I didn't have the skill to live with someone with the mental illnesses that my wife had, and that my getting therapy wasn't necessarily a failure. You know, it was a place to learn, and so from that it became a much more active and willing participant in the therapy process And we did work on. You know we worked on. You know cognitive behavioral therapy right, we're working on recognizing what were my triggers to getting angry and why did I let myself get to that point? right, how can I recognize those triggers earlier And maybe employ different strategies about how to think about it or how to react to those triggers? Before you know, before you get to the point where you're yelling, you know you're losing yourself and yelling about dumb things, right, and you know. So working on those skills certainly helped. 

Working on you know how living with some, how living with someone that had a mental illness, how you can be supportive and understanding how what makes sense in your head doesn't necessarily make sense in their head. Right, and it really did. It really did make my life and Meg's life a lot better, and you know. So. From that I'm forever grateful. And then from there, you know, after I can't even remember how many sessions, but after a number of sessions where she was like my therapist was like you seem in a really good place and Meg had wanted to start rebuilding our relationship Again, we started to. 

We started to go to marriage counseling and, you know, working with the marriage counselor in that setting helped us communicate better together. You know where, instead of being, you know, two people with opposite goals. How can we make, how can we work to have similar goals and how do we communicate that? And then we're not perfect, of course, right, you know, but we certainly fight about things less frequently. We have just we have constructive discussions, and it is a much better place to be, so a lot more fun, i'll say that. 

0:36:45 - Speaker 2
There's so many things that, like my brain, wanted to touch on as you were talking there but there's this overarching arc there that like I wanna then like hit on, because this is something I relate to so much is, i was aware of my mental health and worked on it so much, but it wasn't until I met my wife, and my wife is like the opposite of me I have the mental health issues and she's the one that doesn't have them. But I didn't know how badly I needed to work on them till I had to live with somebody else, yeah, till I had to be with somebody else all the time. And now it wasn't just a matter of I could fake it till I made it at work, at school and every other thing. But then when I was at home and I had to be by myself, i didn't realize how much I was just soaking, but then I was just passing the time, but like when now somebody else is around, so like would you say that was like you relate to that thought. 

0:37:39 - Speaker 1
Oh, absolutely. 

0:37:40 - Speaker 2
Because obviously it is there for you. 

0:37:42 - Speaker 1
Absolutely When I was still single. I mean, my home was a place to get away from everything. All right, you could turn off everything, you could just kind of be yourself, and suddenly you didn't have that personal space anymore. Suddenly you had someone there, and in the case of Maggie, you had someone there that was struggling. And as a guy, i think we always want to help right, we want to solve problems, and I think there are many places where solving problems is good. But here is a problem I didn't know how to solve right, so I was making things more stressful and we just, you know that became that friction point and eventually it became the breaking point. 

0:38:36 - Speaker 2
The anger right Does that kind of surface as things that hard. I'm assuming that obviously built up with stress over time and as the stress built up your mental health probably got worse and then the anger probably developed out of that, like you being in a worse place, cortisol levels being high all the time. Do you ever feel like when you were angry and you guys were yelling or fighting in those times? could you relate to an emotional time in your childhood? Because I feel like anytime me and my wife fight and we have gotten better but in our earlier relationship some of the fights and I'd yell and I could always tell I felt that it was almost like how I'd yell and argued my sister when I was a little kid. You know, because it's family all of a sudden and not just a girlfriend, it's like it's your wife. 

0:39:21 - Speaker 1
They're not going anywhere, you're stuck with them. You're stuck with them. 

0:39:23 - Speaker 2
It's almost like this child argument comes out and I'm like this is how I argued as a child. Do you feel that? Do you see? 

0:39:31 - Speaker 1
that You know, i think we do, because I certainly do. And now my parents when they argued I mean it would be it rarely seemed like it was ever in front of my brother and I certainly remember some arguments. But we learn from our parents and how I would argue might be very different than how she grew up listening and learning arguments and her tactics were probably similar to that of her parents, so that you had those conflicting styles. But yeah, you kind of resort to what you know, to what you had practiced before. 

You know, i certainly look back on some of my behaviors during the arguments and it's like that was very immature, you know, perhaps because that might've been how I would've been at nine, 10, 11, 12, or whatever age. But again, i was fairly fortunate then as a kid that rarely did we get in big arguments. I mean I certainly had a couple arguments with my brother that were big, that resulted in a lot of tears, and certainly with my parents the same way. But it was different, because here I'm arguing with someone who had a different style and who had a different approach. 

0:41:05 - Speaker 2
So at first you obviously have to kind of learn a lot about her mental health and like learn about mental health from just a point of view of like you dig into it further than you probably ever like had. So did you like do research on it to kind of learn more about it, or Yeah? 

0:41:19 - Speaker 1
honestly, for as much as I like to read about things, you know I love to do that deep wiki dive I never really did about mental health issues related to her particularly. You know, i more or less I took the word of my therapist. I took the word of her therapist, I took the word of marriage counseling People that were, I think, more efficient at dispensing that knowledge, because, of course, a lot of research is reading a bunch of stuff that you don't really wanna read about, you know, to get to the part that you do wanna read about, right, and whereas these experts could dispense that knowledge in a much more efficient and efficient manner. 

0:42:08 - Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, you can kind of give them directly what is going on in your life and they're able to kind of like give it to you through a lens of somebody who's not emotionally attached to anything that's going on and can give you the reasonable, rational way of looking at it, plus the way that might help you approach it in the right manner. 

0:42:28 - Speaker 1
Now, certainly, you know, certainly a lot of times, though, what they would do would be they would give me something to kind of chew on. And you know where exercise worked in my life going on long bike rides or longer runs would be. You know, i'm not someone that listens to music. You know, i like to be in the moment of when I'm running or when I'm biking, and my mind would certainly work over those things. 

I remember one time I was on a run when Meg was close to her sickest, you know, like she was probably a month or two away from going for treatment, and I remember that my mind had kind of come to the conclusion that she was going to die, you know, and I remember, during that run, you know, that thought hitting my head, you know, whatever I was thinking of, how, you know how she was in kind of this pattern to not get help, my mind had just kind of come to the conclusion that, you know, it discontinues, she's going to die and I, you know, i kind of broke down on that run It was the only time I'd ever stopped a run, you know, got, you know, cheered up a little bit, and it was like, you know, we need to do something. 

0:43:42 - Speaker 2
You know, yeah, that's hard because, especially in the case of you, felt like you couldn't. You couldn't do it for her, so you had to do it in a way where you weren't forcing her, so you didn't push, because this year's going to push you further away. 

0:43:58 - Speaker 1
Right in that place. I mean, you know where we were at that point in our lives. I mean I would say that she loved her eating disorder more than she loved me. You know that if it came to a choice between maintaining maintaining her eating disorder or maintaining relationship, oh I was out the door. You know so how. You know how was I going to play that, how was I going to push for her to get help? And you know, unfortunately she had. She does have wonderful parents who were able to step up and be that force, like, okay, look, we're done playing this game. You know, and they did those things. Not everybody has those parents. So again, you know, i look at my childhood and I'll say I'm fortunate. And I'll, you know, she'll describe her childhood and we can say and I know her parents and I know her family and we can say she's fortunate in that regard. 

0:44:56 - Speaker 2
I had a thought there about when you said let me think about, let me just kind of gather the thought again Okay, like we're going to therapy, like that's something I think. a lot of people in marriages and a lot of relationships you know like people talk about, like divorce rates high. It's only 50% because they count in double. second divorce, third divorce actually divorce is like 70% for first time marriages. But like one thing that through my mental health and through getting older I've really learned, especially about relationships and my marriages you couldn't really make a marriage work with anybody that you're willing to make it work with. 

Yes yes, that includes putting in the work, and sometimes that work is the fact that if you're misaligned on how you're seeing something, that having to get a third party in there or seeing your own therapist, and that somebody is helping to distill some of the information that you're getting from your relationship with you, that it's almost like vital and so necessary that it's a shame that it's looked at as like a medical diagnosis that you have to go get a professional help for. But in reality it's no different than physical health. It is mental health, physical health and mental health and physical health multiplied to relationships and marriages. 

0:46:06 - Speaker 1
Absolutely One of the things that I tried to tell anyone that would listen, right Where I'm, in a space where I can voice that opinion, if I know two people who are getting married, i mean almost every time, without fail, i'll say go to marriage counseling, learn how to communicate with your spouse, because right now you think you guys do a great job on a very kind of superficial level, but once your life gets to that point where it's more intertwined, you're going to need probably better communication. And even if you have great communication strategies and styles that work well together, it's good to work on that and kind of set the ground rules. And that's where Meg and I are at. Whereas before, when we would fight, we might say things that we regret, now we don't bring up old fights, we don't bring up old grudges. 

Certainly, sometimes I can say something, or she can say something, in which we know, ooh, that might have been beyond the, that might have been a little out of bounds, in which the onus is now on the person who said it to apologize for it. Right, i don't like to let something if I maybe came on a little harshly or disagreed a little too sharply or maybe made it seem too personal to Meg. I need to say something about that. And again, that's that skill that I got from going to marriage counseling. That's insight that I got going to therapy. 

0:47:48 - Speaker 2
My wife and I did counseling last year for a short period because we wanted to improve our communication. We could tell we were off And it's amazing how much having somebody, a third person, sit there in front of us helped. 

Just me see her point of view on things so much more in a way that, like, i let go of such rigid thoughts ahead of my mind that I don't know if I would have let go of without some of that, like really forcing myself to sit down and confront it while somebody's talking about it and my wife's talking about it. 

0:48:17 - Speaker 1
And not only does it help you see their point, it also helps you express your own points better. I think a lot of times. 

0:48:23 - Speaker 2
It does. 

0:48:24 - Speaker 1
You know where you make it less about. This is a will thing, and hey, we both have this mutual goal here. This is how I think it can work, And then being able to accommodate the other person's point of view. So, yeah, I mean and that was the interesting thing to bring it back to you was that I had gone, so you graduated 2009, correct, So that would have been kind of right where we were working on those type of skills. So my own experience helped me push to say hey look, John, there are ways, there are avenues here to explore. That it's not a sign of weakness, it's not a medical diagnosis. It's an opportunity to recognize your triggers, to recognize things that make you anxious in that thought pattern that just keeps building until it's all consuming. Right, Like it's normal to have anxieties, it's normal to have to be nervous or to be shy, but when it gets to that point where it consumes you, that's not a fun place to be. 

0:49:43 - Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, cause you said something before that really made me relate, which is about how I used to think I was so fine, even when I was going through some mental health stuff, but still young enough that I was just like I'm gonna deal with this. this is gonna go away, specifically if the relationship anxiety would come and I'd just be like this is literally only cause of the relationship And if I wasn't in the relationship, i didn't have the mental health issues. 

0:50:09 - Speaker 1
I didn't have the anxiety, But the reality is right. you had the relationship and you want to keep that relationship. and how can you make that relationship better? So, yeah, I can relate to that wholeheartedly, 100%, Yeah, yeah. 

0:50:23 - Speaker 2
And it's cool to hear that you've gone. The journey I've been through is one that you've been through yourself, which is learning that. Learning that, okay, just cause I'm fine in my mind by myself doesn't mean I'm fine when I'm with somebody else long term. And that awareness where do you feel like that awareness came from for you? Because a lot of people will be right in the middle of these situations and they'll never gain the awareness to then make the right choices and move forward. 

0:50:55 - Speaker 1
Again, therapy, i think, started that self-awareness process right. Just the start of talking to someone introduce that concept of your own self-awareness and how you look at things and how that fits with what you're trying to do, and then you continue to grow from there right After having gone through the therapy. Now I have this mindset at which I want to look at things or look at people and try to have that different mindset. Certainly, certainly just how I treat athletes right. When I first started as an athletic trainer it was anyone that complained was something look, if you're not dying, you need to be practicing. But now, having grown from that, i try to be much more sympathetic, much more accommodating. I try to give kids strategies for how to either play with an injury. Obviously I'm always trying to help them from the injury, but it's just a normal growth that occurs, i guess. 

0:52:12 - Speaker 2
Dern kind of like to think of it with your wife and like you're feeling the most stressed. Do you feel like you did, you have like male friends that you could open up to about this stuff, or were you pretty reserved when it came to talking about this stuff with male friends? 

0:52:28 - Speaker 1
You know, if I had any complaints, i kept them to a minimum and very topical, certainly nothing in depth. And again, i'm not sure if it was just kind of insecurity where you say, look, i want to appear like everything's on the up and up, i want to appear like everything is together When they weren't necessarily. You know I since that point I still haven't complained. And what's funny is like talking about the insecure portion of it. I remember I would always be very upset if Meg complained about me to someone else, like why would you do that? You know I don't do that to my friends and or family, right, You know I just. And now it's like, look, if she does, it's not a big deal. They know who I am, they know what I, you know how I act and stuff. So I'm not worried about, you know, being undermined, which is, i guess, what I kind of felt like in those days, you know. So I didn't want to undermine myself with my friends. You know, no, things are good with Meg and I. 

You know the normal struggles I never, i always used to. I always remember, before Meg and I got married, bachelor party, a bunch of the youth football coaches brought me like like $80 in singles, because they knew what was going on at the Bachelor party later that night And they brought it to me. And then they're like Chris, run away, right, run away. And that was funny to me because it's like, well, we all joke about how hard marriage is, but I had no idea, right, and it was like during our boy. I really understood them at that time. But yeah, i, you know, i would never. I would never say, oh, yeah, things are tough with Meg and I, even to this day, but how much of that is because I still hold the same insecurities about, like, how I appear or that or that. You know, meg and I just have never gotten back to that lower place, that bad a place, you know, that place where you're not sure of the. You know the marriage is gonna continue. 

0:55:10 - Speaker 2
So you're like not sure necessarily if you got into like a really bad place in life that you would talk to friends at this point either. 

0:55:16 - Speaker 1
Yeah, maybe I wouldn't talk to friends, but I do think I would talk, you know to the therapist. 

Yeah, yeah it's, it's. I kind of. I kind of have this view that I don't want to necessarily, like, burden my friends with my own, you know, struggles. Certainly I do open up to friends, you know. Hey, these things are going on, but not in the same way that I would to a therapist, because you know, your friends are your friends, right, and they will always listen to you. You hope Some of my friends very lot, they had a VM for them to pick on me, but you know, in reality it's like, but they don't quite have that skill to help And what I would be looking for would be help. 

You know, i don't think that. I don't think that if we did get to that place, i know that I would tell my friends a lot sooner. I remember telling, i remember the first times telling my friends that it that Meg had left me And it was, it always just felt awkward. You know, it's like it always just, it never felt right And every time I think I mentioned it to someone it was just boy, i could have just gone without telling them, you know. 

0:56:41 - Speaker 2
Like guy, like guy friends. 

0:56:43 - Speaker 1
Guy, friends and girlfriends. Okay girlfriends, female friends. 

0:56:47 - Speaker 2
Like they didn't have the words to console you so they kind of like you felt that energy type of thing. 

0:56:53 - Speaker 1
Oh yeah, okay first you know, yeah, right, like well, yeah, you know, and of course part of it is you don't want to. you know and I'm saying this kind of is a joke You don't want them to be. oh, thank God, you know About time. 

0:57:08 - Speaker 2
And oh hell. 

0:57:11 - Speaker 1
You got lucky, Or you know. 

0:57:13 - Speaker 2
You guys had reservations this whole time. 

Hoping to get back with that person, right, yeah, so yeah, i uh because this is something I relate to so much is I was aware of my mental health and worked on it so much. But it wasn't until I met my wife, and my wife is like the opposite of me. I have the mental health issues and she's the one that doesn't have them. But I didn't know how badly I needed to work on them till I had to live with somebody else, yeah, till I had to be with somebody else all the time. And now it wasn't just a matter of I could fake it till I made it at work, at school and every other thing. But then when I was at home and I had to be by myself, i didn't realize how much I was just soaking, but then I was just passing the time, but like when now somebody else is around, so like would you say, that was like you relate to that thought. 

0:37:39 - Speaker 1
Oh, absolutely. 

0:37:40 - Speaker 2
Because obviously it is there for you. 

0:37:42 - Speaker 1
Absolutely When I was still single. I mean, my home was a place to get away from everything. All right, you could turn off everything, you could just kind of be yourself, and suddenly you didn't have that personal space anymore. Suddenly you had someone there, and in the case of Maggie, you had someone there that was struggling. And as a guy, i think we always want to help right, we want to solve problems, and I think there are many places where solving problems is good. But here is a problem I didn't know how to solve right, so I was making things more stressful and we just, you know that became that friction point and eventually it became the breaking point. 

0:38:36 - Speaker 2
The anger right Does that kind of surface as things that hard. I'm assuming that obviously built up with stress over time and as the stress built up your mental health probably got worse and then the anger probably developed out of that, like you being in a worse place, cortisol levels being high all the time. Do you ever feel like when you were angry and you guys were yelling or fighting in those times? could you relate to an emotional time in your childhood? Because I feel like anytime me and my wife fight and we have gotten better but in our earlier relationship some of the fights and I'd yell and I could always tell I felt that it was almost like how I'd yell and argued my sister when I was a little kid. You know, because it's family all of a sudden and not just a girlfriend, it's like it's your wife. 

0:39:21 - Speaker 1
They're not going anywhere, you're stuck with them. You're stuck with them. 

0:39:23 - Speaker 2
It's almost like this child argument comes out and I'm like this is how I argued as a child. Do you feel that? Do you see? 

0:39:31 - Speaker 1
that You know, i think we do, because I certainly do. And now my parents when they argued I mean it would be it rarely seemed like it was ever in front of my brother and I certainly remember some arguments. But we learn from our parents and how I would argue might be very different than how she grew up listening and learning arguments and her tactics were probably similar to that of her parents, so that you had those conflicting styles. But yeah, you kind of resort to what you know, to what you had practiced before. 

You know, i certainly look back on some of my behaviors during the arguments and it's like that was very immature, you know, perhaps because that might've been how I would've been at nine, 10, 11, 12, or whatever age. But again, i was fairly fortunate then as a kid that rarely did we get in big arguments. I mean I certainly had a couple arguments with my brother that were big, that resulted in a lot of tears, and certainly with my parents the same way. But it was different, because here I'm arguing with someone who had a different style and who had a different approach. 

0:41:05 - Speaker 2
So at first you obviously have to kind of learn a lot about her mental health and like learn about mental health from just a point of view of like you dig into it further than you probably ever like had. So did you like do research on it to kind of learn more about it, or Yeah? 

0:41:19 - Speaker 1
honestly, for as much as I like to read about things, you know I love to do that deep wiki dive I never really did about mental health issues related to her particularly. You know, i more or less I took the word of my therapist. I took the word of her therapist, I took the word of marriage counseling People that were, I think, more efficient at dispensing that knowledge, because, of course, a lot of research is reading a bunch of stuff that you don't really wanna read about, you know, to get to the part that you do wanna read about, right, and whereas these experts could dispense that knowledge in a much more efficient and efficient manner. 

0:42:08 - Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, you can kind of give them directly what is going on in your life and they're able to kind of like give it to you through a lens of somebody who's not emotionally attached to anything that's going on and can give you the reasonable, rational way of looking at it, plus the way that might help you approach it in the right manner. 

0:42:28 - Speaker 1
Now, certainly, you know, certainly a lot of times, though, what they would do would be they would give me something to kind of chew on. And you know where exercise worked in my life going on long bike rides or longer runs would be. You know, i'm not someone that listens to music. You know, i like to be in the moment of when I'm running or when I'm biking, and my mind would certainly work over those things. 

I remember one time I was on a run when Meg was close to her sickest, you know, like she was probably a month or two away from going for treatment, and I remember that my mind had kind of come to the conclusion that she was going to die, you know, and I remember, during that run, you know, that thought hitting my head, you know, whatever I was thinking of, how, you know how she was in kind of this pattern to not get help, my mind had just kind of come to the conclusion that, you know, it discontinues, she's going to die and I, you know, i kind of broke down on that run It was the only time I'd ever stopped a run, you know, got, you know, cheered up a little bit, and it was like, you know, we need to do something. 

0:43:42 - Speaker 2
You know, yeah, that's hard because, especially in the case of you, felt like you couldn't. You couldn't do it for her, so you had to do it in a way where you weren't forcing her, so you didn't push, because this year's going to push you further away. 

0:43:58 - Speaker 1
Right in that place. I mean, you know where we were at that point in our lives. I mean I would say that she loved her eating disorder more than she loved me. You know that if it came to a choice between maintaining maintaining her eating disorder or maintaining relationship, oh I was out the door. You know so how. You know how was I going to play that, how was I going to push for her to get help? And you know, unfortunately she had. She does have wonderful parents who were able to step up and be that force, like, okay, look, we're done playing this game. You know, and they did those things. Not everybody has those parents. So again, you know, i look at my childhood and I'll say I'm fortunate. And I'll, you know, she'll describe her childhood and we can say and I know her parents and I know her family and we can say she's fortunate in that regard. 

0:44:56 - Speaker 2
I had a thought there about when you said let me think about, let me just kind of gather the thought again Okay, like we're going to therapy, like that's something I think. a lot of people in marriages and a lot of relationships you know like people talk about, like divorce rates high. It's only 50% because they count in double. second divorce, third divorce actually divorce is like 70% for first time marriages. But like one thing that through my mental health and through getting older I've really learned, especially about relationships and my marriages you couldn't really make a marriage work with anybody that you're willing to make it work with. 

Yes yes, that includes putting in the work, and sometimes that work is the fact that if you're misaligned on how you're seeing something, that having to get a third party in there or seeing your own therapist, and that somebody is helping to distill some of the information that you're getting from your relationship with you, that it's almost like vital and so necessary that it's a shame that it's looked at as like a medical diagnosis that you have to go get a professional help for. But in reality it's no different than physical health. It is mental health, physical health and mental health and physical health multiplied to relationships and marriages. 

0:46:06 - Speaker 1
Absolutely One of the things that I tried to tell anyone that would listen, right Where I'm, in a space where I can voice that opinion, if I know two people who are getting married, i mean almost every time, without fail, i'll say go to marriage counseling, learn how to communicate with your spouse, because right now you think you guys do a great job on a very kind of superficial level, but once your life gets to that point where it's more intertwined, you're going to need probably better communication. And even if you have great communication strategies and styles that work well together, it's good to work on that and kind of set the ground rules. And that's where Meg and I are at. Whereas before, when we would fight, we might say things that we regret, now we don't bring up old fights, we don't bring up old grudges. 

Certainly, sometimes I can say something, or she can say something, in which we know, ooh, that might have been beyond the, that might have been a little out of bounds, in which the onus is now on the person who said it to apologize for it. Right, i don't like to let something if I maybe came on a little harshly or disagreed a little too sharply or maybe made it seem too personal to Meg. I need to say something about that. And again, that's that skill that I got from going to marriage counseling. That's insight that I got going to therapy. 

0:47:48 - Speaker 2
My wife and I did counseling last year for a short period because we wanted to improve our communication. We could tell we were off And it's amazing how much having somebody, a third person, sit there in front of us helped. 

Just me see her point of view on things so much more in a way that, like, i let go of such rigid thoughts ahead of my mind that I don't know if I would have let go of without some of that, like really forcing myself to sit down and confront it while somebody's talking about it and my wife's talking about it. 

0:48:17 - Speaker 1
And not only does it help you see their point, it also helps you express your own points better. I think a lot of times. 

0:48:23 - Speaker 2
It does. 

0:48:24 - Speaker 1
You know where you make it less about. This is a will thing, and hey, we both have this mutual goal here. This is how I think it can work, And then being able to accommodate the other person's point of view. So, yeah, I mean and that was the interesting thing to bring it back to you was that I had gone, so you graduated 2009, correct, So that would have been kind of right where we were working on those type of skills. So my own experience helped me push to say hey look, John, there are ways, there are avenues here to explore. That it's not a sign of weakness, it's not a medical diagnosis. It's an opportunity to recognize your triggers, to recognize things that make you anxious in that thought pattern that just keeps building until it's all consuming. Right, Like it's normal to have anxieties, it's normal to have to be nervous or to be shy, but when it gets to that point where it consumes you, that's not a fun place to be. 

0:49:43 - Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, cause you said something before that really made me relate, which is about how I used to think I was so fine, even when I was going through some mental health stuff, but still young enough that I was just like I'm gonna deal with this. this is gonna go away, specifically if the relationship anxiety would come and I'd just be like this is literally only cause of the relationship And if I wasn't in the relationship, i didn't have the mental health issues. 

0:50:09 - Speaker 1
I didn't have the anxiety, But the reality is right. you had the relationship and you want to keep that relationship. and how can you make that relationship better? So, yeah, I can relate to that wholeheartedly, 100%, Yeah, yeah. 

0:50:23 - Speaker 2
And it's cool to hear that you've gone. The journey I've been through is one that you've been through yourself, which is learning that. Learning that, okay, just cause I'm fine in my mind by myself doesn't mean I'm fine when I'm with somebody else long term. And that awareness where do you feel like that awareness came from for you? Because a lot of people will be right in the middle of these situations and they'll never gain the awareness to then make the right choices and move forward. 

0:50:55 - Speaker 1
Again, therapy, i think, started that self-awareness process right. Just the start of talking to someone introduce that concept of your own self-awareness and how you look at things and how that fits with what you're trying to do, and then you continue to grow from there right After having gone through the therapy. Now I have this mindset at which I want to look at things or look at people and try to have that different mindset. Certainly, certainly just how I treat athletes right. When I first started as an athletic trainer it was anyone that complained was something look, if you're not dying, you need to be practicing. But now, having grown from that, i try to be much more sympathetic, much more accommodating. I try to give kids strategies for how to either play with an injury. Obviously I'm always trying to help them from the injury, but it's just a normal growth that occurs, i guess. 

0:52:12 - Speaker 2
Dern kind of like to think of it with your wife and like you're feeling the most stressed. Do you feel like you did, you have like male friends that you could open up to about this stuff, or were you pretty reserved when it came to talking about this stuff with male friends? 

0:52:28 - Speaker 1
You know, if I had any complaints, i kept them to a minimum and very topical, certainly nothing in depth. And again, i'm not sure if it was just kind of insecurity where you say, look, i want to appear like everything's on the up and up, i want to appear like everything is together When they weren't necessarily. You know I since that point I still haven't complained. And what's funny is like talking about the insecure portion of it. I remember I would always be very upset if Meg complained about me to someone else, like why would you do that? You know I don't do that to my friends and or family, right, You know I just. And now it's like, look, if she does, it's not a big deal. They know who I am, they know what I, you know how I act and stuff. So I'm not worried about, you know, being undermined, which is, i guess, what I kind of felt like in those days, you know. So I didn't want to undermine myself with my friends. You know, no, things are good with Meg and I. 

You know the normal struggles I never, i always used to. I always remember, before Meg and I got married, bachelor party, a bunch of the youth football coaches brought me like like $80 in singles, because they knew what was going on at the Bachelor party later that night And they brought it to me. And then they're like Chris, run away, right, run away. And that was funny to me because it's like, well, we all joke about how hard marriage is, but I had no idea, right, and it was like during our boy. I really understood them at that time. But yeah, i, you know, i would never. I would never say, oh, yeah, things are tough with Meg and I, even to this day, but how much of that is because I still hold the same insecurities about, like, how I appear or that or that. You know, meg and I just have never gotten back to that lower place, that bad a place, you know, that place where you're not sure of the. You know the marriage is gonna continue. 

0:55:10 - Speaker 2
So you're like not sure necessarily if you got into like a really bad place in life that you would talk to friends at this point either. 

0:55:16 - Speaker 1
Yeah, maybe I wouldn't talk to friends, but I do think I would talk, you know to the therapist. 

Yeah, yeah it's, it's. I kind of. I kind of have this view that I don't want to necessarily, like, burden my friends with my own, you know, struggles. Certainly I do open up to friends, you know. Hey, these things are going on, but not in the same way that I would to a therapist, because you know, your friends are your friends, right, and they will always listen to you. You hope Some of my friends very lot, they had a VM for them to pick on me, but you know, in reality it's like, but they don't quite have that skill to help And what I would be looking for would be help. 

You know, i don't think that. I don't think that if we did get to that place, i know that I would tell my friends a lot sooner. I remember telling, i remember the first times telling my friends that it that Meg had left me And it was, it always just felt awkward. You know, it's like it always just, it never felt right And every time I think I mentioned it to someone it was just boy, i could have just gone without telling them, you know. 

0:56:41 - Speaker 2
Like guy, like guy friends. 

0:56:43 - Speaker 1
Guy, friends and girlfriends. Okay girlfriends, female friends. 

0:56:47 - Speaker 2
Like they didn't have the words to console you so they kind of like you felt that energy type of thing. 

0:56:53 - Speaker 1
Oh yeah, okay first you know, yeah, right, like well, yeah, you know, and of course part of it is you don't want to. you know and I'm saying this kind of is a joke You don't want them to be. oh, thank God, you know About time. 

0:57:08 - Speaker 2
And oh hell. 

0:57:11 - Speaker 1
You got lucky, Or you know. 

0:57:13 - Speaker 2
You guys had reservations this whole time. 

Hoping to get back with that person, right, yeah, so yeah, i uh, i think it's hard because guys, when we hang out with guys, we do want to be more immature. We kind of want to shoot shit. It's difficult because I get it. There's things that I feel like if you would say to a therapist that you could never sit there and talk with a guy friend without feeling like you're trying to burden them. Part of it is maybe guys need to be better about being like that, but we're kind of not Women are able to open up like that and kind of feel like women can vent to each other. 

That's probably the word that we can use. Women can vent to each other and they just accept it and they love it and they listen. Guys don't vent to each other. Maybe it should just be venting and she'd be like hey, i'm not looking for a solution, but let me just vent to you a little bit. Maybe guys need to be able to do that with each other more often, comfortably, because more often than not I think guys just need to get words out of their mouth. For me even to sometimes find journaling helps me, let alone, sometimes I would talk out loud while I'm walking outside To myself as if I was journaling, but I'm just talking out loud and it's like just getting the words out of my brain. 

0:58:25 - Speaker 1
The people walk a little wider away. 

0:58:26 - Speaker 2
Yeah, it's an empty little street. 

0:58:29 - Speaker 1
Nobody hears me. I'm home. I'm going to walk on this side of this road. 

0:58:33 - Speaker 2
But just getting the words out of my head helps. I think sometimes getting the words out of your head to somebody that maybe you can console and helps too. 

0:58:41 - Speaker 1
Again that comes back for me is the running. It is just letting my mind, and I'm always amazed where my mind will go in those moments where, when I run, i try to lose track of time, because if you're keeping track of time, man running sucks. The same is a little less true for bike riding, because you're out there longer but you're seeing more, but your mind just starts to go in these atypical places. I find that therapeutic, which is why right now, where I don't have as many at and I'm making excuses but I haven't sought as many avenues for exercising, it's like, yeah, after coming off the pandemic, that was another very tough time. There was like I didn't have what I felt was like my normal avenues And I would look back during the times of the pandemic and say that was probably a failure on my part, that I didn't seek out help because work became very. Work had been challenging before the pandemic, but then during the pandemic, work became very challenging. Just my relationship with work and how I saw my job and being pulled apart from the community. That would have sent me into what I can look back on and say, yes, that's definitely my second bout of depression And I remember talking. 

I remember I had to go in for a doctor's appointment and they had this questionnaire And I answered all the questions. I tried to be honest. And the doctor came in and it's like hey, chris, you did our questionnaire And you scored in a range where we might say you're suffering depression. And I just looked at him and I said, well, if I had to look at everything and what you're telling me, i certainly would say If you called me depressed, i wouldn't be upset, i wouldn't disagree. But at that time I didn't feel like I don't know. If I didn't feel like I needed help, i didn't know if I would benefit from help, Maybe I just felt like I just needed to get out and be me more. But eventually I would work through those issues. 

Now some of the things were outside of my control. My job was very challenging. At that time It felt like my job was all consuming. At that time It felt like in order to have your life, you had to plan your life to a degree that wasn't fun anymore. If you wanted a weekend off, you had to put in for that, because otherwise you were maybe technically on call And it just wasn't the kind of life that I had envisioned for myself. 

But as things improved work-wise and as I was able to get back to more normal activities particularly, again, biking is a very important part of my life As I was able to get to those things, that would improve. Another thing was that I really kind of got into a habit of I'm going to have a drink every night, and maybe more than a drink every night, and then starting to feel like you're a slave to that routine. Never at any point did I feel like I was an alcoholic. I never felt like, oh, i need to get a drink Again. I could go on a road trip or I could go see my parents or I could go hang out with a lot of various places where I wouldn't normally drink, and just be fine, not be like where's that alcohol at? I need to sneak something in. 

1:03:02 - Speaker 2
But at home there's that trigger. Yeah, but at home. 

1:03:05 - Speaker 1
here was this pattern During the weeknights. I felt like, okay, well, I got to get back home. I can't go see my friends. I can't go see because this is this routine I had kind of established. Part of the reason I had done that was alcohol can help you sleep in small amounts and at appropriate times. 

For me here at this job, I would be working on a football game or I'd be working at a basketball game and the coaches yell and parents yell and it's all supportive or maybe it's a loud environment. I would come home still mind wound up from that, Rather than employing strategies to help me relax from that, rather than employing routines that were different, having a drink was just kind of a nice way to do those things. Then it started to feel like I had to be with my friends less to have that drink. I couldn't stop at a friend's place on the way home because I needed to just get home, have that drink, go to bed. I started taking myself out of routines that were much more beneficial into routines that were maybe more isolating and certainly disabling to my mindset. 

1:04:40 - Speaker 2
You kind of gain awareness of that eventually and then transition out of it. 

1:04:49 - Speaker 1
It felt like I had to form new habits and I had to be. I just replaced the alcoholic drinks with water. Then, suddenly now I began sleeping better. I'd gotten to a place, and this happens When you drink when you're young. It doesn't necessarily disturb your sleep as much. One of the things that happens when you drink is your brain produces I think it's glutamine. When you drink now, glutamine is a brain stimulants. When you drink, you decrease production of that glutamine. That's one of the reasons why there's this depressive effect, this central nervous system depressive effect. 

And the gabbing that increase When you stop drinking. Your body kicks up. If you go out drinking with your buddies and you drink and you go to sleep, you probably aren't getting to that full deep sleep because then, as your liver is processing the alcohol and is kicking up that glutamine production, your brain starts to become a little too active to get into that deepest form of sleep, which is part of the reason why you feel hungover. There are plenty of reasons alcohol induces hangover, but that might be the biggest one. And subsequently there are people who are like why do I wake up so early in the morning after a night of drinking? and certainly that would happen to me six o'clock in my mind it's racing, but I was never getting into that deep. It got to a point where I was never getting into that deep form of sleep And subsequently I wasn't dreaming, or maybe I thought I was dreaming but I wasn't remembering the dreams. And of course dreams become such an important part of memory, both for short term and long term memories. 

1:06:55 - Speaker 2
And processing the day. 

1:06:57 - Speaker 1
Yeah, processing the day. So I kind of went through a long period where I'm just like I don't remember dreams And when I changed to habit, when I went to drinking water, suddenly my dreams became so vivid And, of course, now I feel like I'm getting back to my mental clarity again. the things that were like. I'm having this tough time remembering exactly when that happened or what word was on the tip of my tongue. That's going away and I feel better. And again, this is from a place where I never was again. what I would typically understand is an alcoholic, but that kind of effect that it had on my life and how much better it is. And it's not that I've given up drinking. My mom didn't raise an Okita right, but certainly it's in a healthy spot now. 

1:07:57 - Speaker 2
Everything in moderation, i think, is definitely okay, absolutely Yeah. 

1:08:00 - Speaker 1
Absolutely That statement. Right there there are people. No fat, Your body needs fat. It's too much fat is bad, right, Or I only eat these things and it's like your body kind of wants that variety. Yes, are we able to construct a vegan diet nowadays? Yeah, because we can get food from all around the world. But think back to the 1800s. It would have been impossible to really actually be a vegan, right. 

1:08:37 - Speaker 2
There's so many vitamins and minerals you're not getting. 

1:08:41 - Speaker 1
You need this, you need that, and when you start thinking in that rigid term, then it makes you kind of a rigid person and it makes your thought process, i think, more rigid as well, which it's hard to be happy as a rigid person, i think. 

1:08:59 - Speaker 2
That is like the biggest takeaway for my 20s is I had to stop being such a rigid person And seeing all this gray in between the black and white and realizing holy shit, there's way more gray than black and white. And that developing into having to let go of thoughts that I've always held onto. that is how my happiness has slowly come to fruition. It's letting go of expectations and letting go of these rigidities that I had built up for so many years. 

1:09:28 - Speaker 1
Like what you're saying, it becomes kind of controlling and that's not a fun place to be. Like you used to talk about eating disorder and disordered eating, right Very different things And it would when disordered patterns start to control you, that's when they're kind of a problem. So exercise can be like that for some people, right, people who need to exercise all the time And they're not happy when they're exercising That can become kind of this controlling thing And now you're getting frustrated when you don't work out. So I don't think I ever got to that point, right. 

But I certainly have known people in my life where we had an instructor when I was in college where we used to joke don't talk to him before his run because he was very crabby. Right After his run he'd be a much happier person. But we remember there was a time where he forgot his running shoes And it was like he was so stressed out and so frustrated by it And then eventually we actually saw him running in like dress, loafers or something. It was like that's kind of a problem. You couldn't let yourself just take a day off, right. 

1:11:02 - Speaker 2
Everything really does need to be done in moderation. There's not a single thing in my life, though, that I've got and that I cannot find that I'm like there has to be balance in it Nothing. Everything I'm like there has to be balance in it, and balance is different for everybody, but there has to be balance, and exercise is one of the biggest ones I've tried to figure out. I thought I needed competition. I just kept like I hurt myself a couple of things. So I got it and went to triathlon. 

1:11:27 - Speaker 1
Yeah, i remember that period where I was like and you had such huge barriers because the swim was the part for you. 

1:11:36 - Speaker 2
Yeah, that one. I'm still going to go back to that. 

1:11:39 - Speaker 1
So again, that's the great thing about Facebook is that I can know that about you because you put that out there. 

1:11:44 - Speaker 2
Yeah, it is, it is. That's probably one of the best things about social media is that you can still keep up with people like that, even when you're not talking to them often. 

1:11:53 - Speaker 1
But yeah, when you were lifting and you got to a point where you were injured. And now what do you do? And that made that injury probably a lot bigger in your mind. Well, I can't stop lifting, I have to lift. Yet this is preventing me. I had had an injury when I was maybe late 20s and I was running quite a bit and it got to a point where I would start off, it was a hip pain that I was having And it would get to the point where when I finished a run, I could barely walk And it used to maybe just bother me for a little bit. And then I couldn't walk for two days And I had to face facts I couldn't run. But now what do I do? 

0:57:23 - Speaker 2
I think it's hard because guys, when we hang out with guys, we do want to be more immature. We kind of want to shoot shit. It's difficult because I get it There's things that I feel like if you would say to a therapist that you could never sit there and talk with a guy friend without feeling like you're trying to burden them. Part of it is maybe guys need to be better about being like that, but we're kind of not. Women are able to open up like that and kind of feel like women can vent to each other. That's probably the word that we can use. Women can vent to each other and they just accept it and they love it and they listen. 

Guys don't vent to each other. Maybe it should just be venting and she'd be like hey, i'm not looking for a solution, but let me just vent to you a little bit. Maybe guys need to be able to do that with each other more often comfortably, because more often than not I think guys just need to get words out of their mouth. For me even to sometimes find journaling helps me, let alone sometimes I would talk out loud while I'm walking outside To myself as if I was journaling. But I'm just talking out loud and it's like just getting the words out of my brain. 

0:58:25 - Speaker 1
The people walk a little wider away. 

0:58:26 - Speaker 2
Yeah, it's an empty little street. 

0:58:29 - Speaker 1
Nobody hears me. I'm home. I'm going to walk on this side of this road. 

0:58:33 - Speaker 2
But just getting the words out of my head helps. I think sometimes getting the words out of your head to somebody that maybe you can console and helps too. 

0:58:41 - Speaker 1
Again that comes back for me is the running. It is just letting my mind, and I'm always amazed where my mind will go in those moments where, when I run, i try to lose track of time, because if you're keeping track of time, man running sucks. The same is a little less true for bike riding, because you're out there longer but you're seeing more, but your mind just starts to go in these atypical places. I find that therapeutic, which is why right now, where I don't have as many at and I'm making excuses but I haven't sought as many avenues for exercising, it's like, yeah, after coming off the pandemic, that was another very tough time. There was like I didn't have what I felt was like my normal avenues And I would look back during the times of the pandemic and say that was probably a failure on my part, that I didn't seek out help because work became very. Work had been challenging before the pandemic, but then during the pandemic, work became very challenging. Just my relationship with work and how I saw my job and being pulled apart from the community. That would have sent me into what I can look back on and say, yes, that's definitely my second bout of depression And I remember talking. 

I remember I had to go in for a doctor's appointment and they had this questionnaire And I answered all the questions. I tried to be honest. And the doctor came in and it's like hey, chris, you did our questionnaire And you scored in a range where we might say you're suffering depression. And I just looked at him and I said, well, if I had to look at everything and what you're telling me, i certainly would say If you called me depressed, i wouldn't be upset, i wouldn't disagree. But at that time I didn't feel like I don't know. If I didn't feel like I needed help, i didn't know if I would benefit from help, Maybe I just felt like I just needed to get out and be me more. But eventually I would work through those issues. 

Now some of the things were outside of my control. My job was very challenging. At that time It felt like my job was all consuming. At that time It felt like in order to have your life, you had to plan your life to a degree that wasn't fun anymore. If you wanted a weekend off, you had to put in for that, because otherwise you were maybe technically on call And it just wasn't the kind of life that I had envisioned for myself. 

But as things improved work-wise and as I was able to get back to more normal activities particularly, again, biking is a very important part of my life As I was able to get to those things, that would improve. Another thing was that I really kind of got into a habit of I'm going to have a drink every night, and maybe more than a drink every night, and then starting to feel like you're a slave to that routine. Never at any point did I feel like I was an alcoholic. I never felt like, oh, i need to get a drink Again. I could go on a road trip or I could go see my parents or I could go hang out with a lot of various places where I wouldn't normally drink, and just be fine, not be like where's that alcohol at? I need to sneak something in. 

1:03:02 - Speaker 2
But at home there's that trigger. Yeah, but at home. 

1:03:05 - Speaker 1
here was this pattern During the weeknights. I felt like, okay, well, I got to get back home. I can't go see my friends. I can't go see because this is this routine I had kind of established. Part of the reason I had done that was alcohol can help you sleep in small amounts and at appropriate times. 

For me here at this job, I would be working on a football game or I'd be working at a basketball game and the coaches yell and parents yell and it's all supportive or maybe it's a loud environment. I would come home still mind wound up from that, Rather than employing strategies to help me relax from that, rather than employing routines that were different, having a drink was just kind of a nice way to do those things. Then it started to feel like I had to be with my friends less to have that drink. I couldn't stop at a friend's place on the way home because I needed to just get home, have that drink, go to bed. I started taking myself out of routines that were much more beneficial into routines that were maybe more isolating and certainly disabling to my mindset. 

1:04:40 - Speaker 2
You kind of gain awareness of that eventually and then transition out of it. 

1:04:49 - Speaker 1
It felt like I had to form new habits and I had to be. I just replaced the alcoholic drinks with water. Then, suddenly now I began sleeping better. I'd gotten to a place, and this happens When you drink when you're young. It doesn't necessarily disturb your sleep as much. One of the things that happens when you drink is your brain produces I think it's glutamine. When you drink now, glutamine is a brain stimulants. When you drink, you decrease production of that glutamine. That's one of the reasons why there's this depressive effect, this central nervous system depressive effect. 

And the gabbing that increase When you stop drinking. Your body kicks up. If you go out drinking with your buddies and you drink and you go to sleep, you probably aren't getting to that full deep sleep because then, as your liver is processing the alcohol and is kicking up that glutamine production, your brain starts to become a little too active to get into that deepest form of sleep, which is part of the reason why you feel hungover. There are plenty of reasons alcohol induces hangover, but that might be the biggest one. And subsequently there are people who are like why do I wake up so early in the morning after a night of drinking? and certainly that would happen to me six o'clock in my mind it's racing, but I was never getting into that deep. It got to a point where I was never getting into that deep form of sleep And subsequently I wasn't dreaming, or maybe I thought I was dreaming but I wasn't remembering the dreams. And of course dreams become such an important part of memory, both for short term and long term memories. 

1:06:55 - Speaker 2
And processing the day. 

1:06:57 - Speaker 1
Yeah, processing the day. So I kind of went through a long period where I'm just like I don't remember dreams And when I changed to habit, when I went to drinking water, suddenly my dreams became so vivid And, of course, now I feel like I'm getting back to my mental clarity again. the things that were like. I'm having this tough time remembering exactly when that happened or what word was on the tip of my tongue. That's going away and I feel better. And again, this is from a place where I never was again. what I would typically understand is an alcoholic, but that kind of effect that it had on my life and how much better it is. And it's not that I've given up drinking. My mom didn't raise an Okita right, but certainly it's in a healthy spot now. 

1:07:57 - Speaker 2
Everything in moderation, i think, is definitely okay, absolutely Yeah. 

1:08:00 - Speaker 1
Absolutely That statement. Right there there are people. No fat, Your body needs fat. It's too much fat is bad, right, Or I only eat these things and it's like your body kind of wants that variety. Yes, are we able to construct a vegan diet nowadays? Yeah, because we can get food from all around the world. But think back to the 1800s. It would have been impossible to really actually be a vegan, right. 

1:08:37 - Speaker 2
There's so many vitamins and minerals you're not getting. 

1:08:41 - Speaker 1
You need this, you need that, and when you start thinking in that rigid term, then it makes you kind of a rigid person and it makes your thought process, i think, more rigid as well, which it's hard to be happy as a rigid person, i think. 

1:08:59 - Speaker 2
That is like the biggest takeaway for my 20s is I had to stop being such a rigid person And seeing all this gray in between the black and white and realizing holy shit, there's way more gray than black and white. And that developing into having to let go of thoughts that I've always held onto. that is how my happiness has slowly come to fruition. It's letting go of expectations and letting go of these rigidities that I had built up for so many years. 

1:09:28 - Speaker 1
Like what you're saying, it becomes kind of controlling and that's not a fun place to be. Like you used to talk about eating disorder and disordered eating, right Very different things And it would when disordered patterns start to control you, that's when they're kind of a problem. So exercise can be like that for some people, right, people who need to exercise all the time And they're not happy when they're exercising That can become kind of this controlling thing And now you're getting frustrated when you don't work out. So I don't think I ever got to that point, right. 

But I certainly have known people in my life where we had an instructor when I was in college where we used to joke don't talk to him before his run because he was very crabby. Right After his run he'd be a much happier person. But we remember there was a time where he forgot his running shoes And it was like he was so stressed out and so frustrated by it And then eventually we actually saw him running in like dress, loafers or something. It was like that's kind of a problem. You couldn't let yourself just take a day off, right. 

1:11:02 - Speaker 2
Everything really does need to be done in moderation. There's not a single thing in my life, though, that I've got and that I cannot find that I'm like there has to be balance in it Nothing. Everything I'm like there has to be balance in it, and balance is different for everybody, but there has to be balance, and exercise is one of the biggest ones I've tried to figure out. I thought I needed competition. I just kept like I hurt myself a couple of things. So I got it and went to triathlon. 

1:11:27 - Speaker 1
Yeah, i remember that period where I was like and you had such huge barriers because the swim was the part for you. 

1:11:36 - Speaker 2
Yeah, that one. I'm still going to go back to that. 

1:11:39 - Speaker 1
So again, that's the great thing about Facebook is that I can know that about you because you put that out there. 

1:11:44 - Speaker 2
Yeah, it is, it is. That's probably one of the best things about social media is that you can still keep up with people like that, even when you're not talking to them often. 

1:11:53 - Speaker 1
But, yeah, when you were lifting and you got to a point where you were injured. And now what do you do? And that made that injury probably a lot bigger in your mind. Well, i can't stop lifting, i have to lift. Yet this is preventing me. 

I had had an injury when I was maybe late 20s and I was running quite a bit and it got to a point where I would start off, it was a hip pain that I was having And it would get to the point where when I finished a run, i could barely walk And it used to maybe just bother me for a little bit. And then I couldn't walk for two days And I had to face facts. I couldn't run. But now what do I do? And that actually got me into biking. But being at that point where the exercise and the pain was causing me so much stress is not a good place to be, and one of the things that's improved my life tremendously is just being able to say I can take a day off or I can take a week off. Now It still does. Just made me yeah, if I pull a muscle running and I say I can't run for three weeks, now I do get a little dog on it about it, but it doesn't consume me the way that it used to. 

1:13:30 - Speaker 2
I mean, i can totally relate to that because there was a point in time where I would just put thinking that pushing through the pain is like what you have to do, because if you push through the pain and work hard enough, eventually it's gonna go away. We're like, in reality, if I had just taken an extended period of time off at some point back in time, i probably would still be powerlifting, probably still would have gotten stronger. 

1:13:50 - Speaker 1
But you would have missed out on so many growth opportunities. 

1:13:53 - Speaker 2
For that, though right And 100%, because I had to lose the identity of being a powerlifter to learn that my identity wasn't attached to my fitness in some certain way either, that I like being fit, i like exercising, but it didn't have to be my identity. My identity had to be something that would be there for the rest of my life and not dependent on whether or not I was lifting heavy at the time. And I think I see a lot of people get stuck in identities and not know how to get out of them, and that's the rigidity, almost, that we were talking about earlier. 

1:14:25 - Speaker 1
If there was something about my job that I don't like is that oftentimes athletic trainers identify themselves as athletic trainers. That becomes such a big part of their identity And I like to tell people that athletic training is what I do, but it's not who I am. Of course, a job is a very important part of you And it takes up a lot of hours in your life, but I don't want to have to look like an athletic trainer all the time. I don't wanna have to talk like an athletic trainer all the time, and I know that a lot of people remember me as an athletic trainer. But to me, the more important identities in my life is being a husband, being a son, being a friend. I'd rather people know me as a deer hunter more than as an athletic trainer, and I'm good at one. 

But it's just one of those things where, yeah, people who? I'm a runner, i'm a biker And when I bike I don't wear typical biking gear. No one wants to see that, right, but so many of the bikers do And I just don't feel like I'm part of them. It's like that outsider mentality kind of kicks in And I'm proud of it. Now I'm not one of those guys, but yeah, it's that identity thing. It's like, no, i am who I am, i'm not what some superficial quality about me? 

1:16:00 - Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. One last thing I think I'd love to kind of dive into as a topic here is you have this really great experience where you've gotten to see so many kids, especially from the early 2000s, because you started at Green Hill 2000. So you've gotten to see kids go through from like pre MySpace into MySpace, into Facebook, into Instagram, into Snapchat, into this era And you've gotten to see these high school kids transition through it. And I have no doubt that there's gotta be differences you've seen between even just a kid from my age and 2009 to 2019, let alone from 2000 to 2023. Now Can you kind of talk about that a little bit, man, and like what that's been like to see and experience? 

1:16:39 - Speaker 1
Absolutely So. First off, i'm not a child behavioral expert. I'm just a guy who has this experience of being around kids And of course, I've grown since that time, so there's the gaps between myself and the kids has grown as well. I still try to make relationships with the kids in the sense of I'm their friend, i'm someone that they can talk to. But certainly kids would see me as different. But I would say that while we saw anxieties, while we saw kids with maybe mental health issues, we saw kids who had stressful lives. Then it seems much more prevalent now And I don't know. To my mind I would say that it is more prevalent now, but I don't know. Is it because I'm more aware? Is it because people are more open about those things? It's probably a combination of all those things. 

Right That I am more aware and people are more open to saying I'm anxious, but it's interesting because I did work in classrooms as a paraprofessional or a teacher aide. I did do some work with students And I remember talking. We had a very thoughtful math teacher, brian DeSalvo, and he and I would talk about it sometimes where it seemed like kids had a harder time getting away from the stress of school Meaning a kid is awkward. We're growing up, we don't know everything, but when I was a kid, certainly, but the 2000s kids they could get away from that. Not everything was always online. Their life wasn't online. Their life wasn't playing games on the headsets and with everybody there. 

Now it seems like today's kids can't get away from that And that's not necessarily better. I don't know how hard it is for them to turn off. As an adult, we can walk away from that and be away from that and be fine, whereas kids I don't know they've learned how to do that. Back in the day, we could have our school friends and our friend friends and whatnot, whereas now, how do you get away from that? 

And so I think that today's kids experience more stress. They experience more anxiety. Certainly, the kids that have come through the pandemic, i think, see the world and feel anxiety differently than kids from an earlier age, but it's not to say that there weren't kids that had stress and anxiety before. I mean, even in 2003,. I can remember dealing with kids that had anxiety, had difficulty with their home life and expressed those in unhealthy ways, and employing strategies to get them to, at least on my end, express them in more healthy ways. You don't have to always be hurt. If you want to be around adults, you can just come in here and hang out, whereas now it's certainly greater number, higher levels of anxiety, do you see? 

1:20:51 - Speaker 2
the difference between boys and girls. 

1:20:55 - Speaker 1
You know, i would say I really wouldn't. I would say that certainly they do tend to handle it differently. I've seen I think more recently, and I've seen more girls express their anxiety in ways that aren't helpful or healthy, where they don't have good coping strategies. I certainly see more boys, though with different struggles. 

1:21:38 - Speaker 2
What sounds different, struggled. 

1:21:51 - Speaker 1
I would say that for guys, they tend to wear their insecurities more. It's hard to say if it's more open or more out there So little things that bother them. When I first started as an athletic trainer, i didn't really have to tell kids this is something that you can play with. If I told them that their leg wasn't going to fall off, they were back out there. Nowadays, particularly with male athletes, i would say it's okay to play with this. Pain does have a very important role in the body, right, but there are certain things that we can expect. This is normal and won't necessarily get worse, versus how they see this, where it's impossible for them to play through right, and using those strategies to help them navigate that and continue to play on the field. That's hard. That can be difficult. 

1:23:12 - Speaker 2
I remember in high school in a football game, having a kid who was helmeted in my quad and my quad was just throbbing and numb and you had checked it out. I was ready to run back out there and play and was still throbbing, you're like. 

1:12:54 - Speaker 1
And that actually got me into biking. But being at that point where the exercise and the pain was causing me so much stress is not a good place to be, and one of the things that's improved my life tremendously is just being able to say I can take a day off or I can take a week off. Now It still does. Just made me. Yeah, if I pull a muscle running and I say I can't run for three weeks now I do get a little dog on it about it, but it doesn't consume me the way that it used to. 

1:13:30 - Speaker 2
I mean, i can totally relate to that because there was a point in time where I would just put thinking that pushing through the pain is like what you have to do, because if you push through the pain and work hard enough, eventually it's gonna go away. We're like, in reality, if I had just taken an extended period of time off at some point back in time, i probably would still be powerlifting, probably still would have gotten stronger. 

1:13:50 - Speaker 1
But you would have missed out on so many growth opportunities. 

1:13:53 - Speaker 2
For that, though right And 100%, because I had to lose the identity of being a powerlifter to learn that my identity wasn't attached to my fitness in some certain way either, that I like being fit, i like exercising, but it didn't have to be my identity. My identity had to be something that would be there for the rest of my life and not dependent on whether or not I was lifting heavy at the time. And I think I see a lot of people get stuck in identities and not know how to get out of them, and that's the rigidity, almost, that we were talking about earlier. 

1:14:25 - Speaker 1
If there was something about my job that I don't like is that oftentimes athletic trainers identify themselves as athletic trainers. That becomes such a big part of their identity And I like to tell people that athletic training is what I do, but it's not who I am. Of course, a job is a very important part of you And it takes up a lot of hours in your life, but I don't want to have to look like an athletic trainer all the time. I don't wanna have to talk like an athletic trainer all the time, and I know that a lot of people remember me as an athletic trainer. But to me, the more important identities in my life is being a husband, being a son, being a friend. I'd rather people know me as a deer hunter more than as an athletic trainer, and I'm good at one. 

But it's just one of those things where, yeah, people who? I'm a runner, i'm a biker And when I bike I don't wear typical biking gear. No one wants to see that, right, but so many of the bikers do And I just don't feel like I'm part of them. It's like that outsider mentality kind of kicks in And I'm proud of it. Now I'm not one of those guys, but yeah, it's that identity thing. It's like, no, i am who I am, i'm not what some superficial quality about me? 

1:16:00 - Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. One last thing I think I'd love to kind of dive into as a topic here is you have this really great experience where you've gotten to see so many kids, especially from the early 2000s, because you started at Green Hill 2000. So you've gotten to see kids go through from like pre MySpace into MySpace, into Facebook, into Instagram, into Snapchat, into this era And you've gotten to see these high school kids transition through it. And I have no doubt that there's gotta be differences you've seen between even just a kid from my age and 2009 to 2019, let alone from 2000 to 2023. Now Can you kind of talk about that a little bit, man, and like what that's been like to see and experience? 

1:16:39 - Speaker 1
Absolutely So. First off, i'm not a child behavioral expert. I'm just a guy who has this experience of being around kids And of course, I've grown since that time, so there's the gaps between myself and the kids has grown as well. I still try to make relationships with the kids in the sense of I'm their friend, i'm someone that they can talk to. But certainly kids would see me as different. But I would say that while we saw anxieties, while we saw kids with maybe mental health issues, we saw kids who had stressful lives. Then it seems much more prevalent now And I don't know. To my mind I would say that it is more prevalent now, but I don't know. Is it because I'm more aware? Is it because people are more open about those things? It's probably a combination of all those things. 

Right That I am more aware and people are more open to saying I'm anxious, but it's interesting because I did work in classrooms as a paraprofessional or a teacher aide. I did do some work with students And I remember talking. We had a very thoughtful math teacher, brian DeSalvo, and he and I would talk about it sometimes where it seemed like kids had a harder time getting away from the stress of school Meaning a kid is awkward. We're growing up, we don't know everything, but when I was a kid, certainly, but the 2000s kids they could get away from that. Not everything was always online. Their life wasn't online. Their life wasn't playing games on the headsets and with everybody there. 

Now it seems like today's kids can't get away from that And that's not necessarily better. I don't know how hard it is for them to turn off. As an adult, we can walk away from that and be away from that and be fine, whereas kids I don't know they've learned how to do that. Back in the day, we could have our school friends and our friend friends and whatnot, whereas now, how do you get away from that? 

And so I think that today's kids experience more stress. They experience more anxiety. Certainly, the kids that have come through the pandemic, i think, see the world and feel anxiety differently than kids from an earlier age, but it's not to say that there weren't kids that had stress and anxiety before. I mean, even in 2003,. I can remember dealing with kids that had anxiety, had difficulty with their home life and expressed those in unhealthy ways, and employing strategies to get them to, at least on my end, express them in more healthy ways. You don't have to always be hurt. If you want to be around adults, you can just come in here and hang out, whereas now it's certainly greater number, higher levels of anxiety, do you see? 

1:20:51 - Speaker 2
the difference between boys and girls. 

1:20:55 - Speaker 1
You know, i would say I really wouldn't. I would say that certainly they do tend to handle it differently. I've seen I think more recently, and I've seen more girls express their anxiety in ways that aren't helpful or healthy, where they don't have good coping strategies. I certainly see more boys, though with different struggles. 

1:21:38 - Speaker 2
What sounds different, struggled. 

1:21:51 - Speaker 1
I would say that for guys, they tend to wear their insecurities more. It's hard to say if it's more open or more out there So little things that bother them. When I first started as an athletic trainer, i didn't really have to tell kids this is something that you can play with. If I told them that their leg wasn't going to fall off, they were back out there. Nowadays, particularly with male athletes, i would say it's okay to play with this. Pain does have a very important role in the body, right, but there are certain things that we can expect. This is normal and won't necessarily get worse, versus how they see this, where it's impossible for them to play through right, and using those strategies to help them navigate that and continue to play on the field. That's hard. That can be difficult. 

1:23:12 - Speaker 2
I remember in high school in a football game having a kid who was helmeted in my quad and my quad was just throbbing and numb and you had checked it out. I was ready to run back out there and play and was still throbbing. You're like You have to yell at me not to, because you're going to have a quack intrusion if you go and play. 

I guarantee you're going to have a quack intrusion, you're not going to play for three more weeks after that And you have to talk me off. And I was so jacked to get back into the game And I feel like that's like kids almost missing that. 

1:23:40 - Speaker 1
They're missing that. 

1:23:41 - Speaker 2
Like I just want to get back out there. 

1:23:43 - Speaker 1
Well, and that's funny because when you started describing it it's like there are really. There are a few injuries where I'm just like no concussion would be one right, but a quad contusion was always one of my famous ones where it's like I remember in college we had a kid get a quad contusion and similar thing. He wanted to play and look, you can do all these things, go ahead, go out there and play And of course, what would happen would be, as you continue to run with that quad contusion, right, the blood clotting that's supposed to happen doesn't happen And because it doesn't clot, it continues to bleed and it continues to bleed into that fascial space. So now you have muscles trying to contract, you have a volume of blood that's in there that wasn't there before And it's not getting out of there. So now that quad has less and less space to contract, you know the pressure within the fascia can become so high that you can actually start to restrict blood flow to the rest of the muscle. And because of the pressure in the fascia is equal to that of your blood pressure, you know where it's a pressure differential to drive the blood right. 

Now we're not getting circulation. Now you're going to start getting muscle death And then that's going to cause a lot more problems. That's going to cause protein to leach into your bloodstream. It can cause your kidneys to eventually shut down if it got bad. And, of course, you know, the more immediate concern is well, we're not getting blood flow to the muscle. How are we going to save that? You know you need a fasciotomy. So so it's like yeah, no, john, you don't want to play with that. Buddy, trust me on this. You know, and you had to and I get it. But now it's the inverse, right? Hey, no, this is okay, buddy, you can get out there. 

1:25:40 - Speaker 2
Go ahead, you know do you think that's like? coming along with this does like anti-masculinity push? that's kind of happened through the last whatever probably 10 plus years that this is kind of been getting pushed. This agenda of like masculinity is bad. 

1:25:55 - Speaker 1
Well, not like. I don't disagree with that sentiment, right, Although I don't necessarily think of it as a like anti-toxic masculinity, right? And I see what people say when they talk about like toxic masculinity. Yeah, i look at the things that they describe and I say that's not masculinity. 

1:26:19 - Speaker 2
That's just asshole behavior. 

1:26:20 - Speaker 1
That's asshole, that's immaturity, that's insecurity. Yeah, you know that's, that's a lot of things, but that's not that's. that's someone trying to affect masculinity, right? Yes, you know, whereas masculinity is a bunch of different behaviors, but it's definitely, you know, different than you know, being too sensitive Or I don't know that I had the correct formation, but you know it's definitely not what. that is right. 

1:26:49 - Speaker 2
It's balanced. 

1:26:50 - Speaker 1
Yeah, masculinity is balanced, it's maturity, it's knowing that you've got to do something even if you don't want to do it. It's knowing your limits, you know. Certainly it's being, you know, qualities that can stretch across both sexes, of course, but certainly you know there is something to being actual, being a man, right, yeah, part of it, i think, part of it, i think, is just growing anxiety. You know, whether it's anxiety on the mom's part or it's anxiety on the dad's part, both, both certainly can suffer from and express anxiety, you know, and that anxiety getting transferred to the kid, right, you know where it's like this, i don't have kids, so I can't speak from, speak what it's like to be a parent, but I have pets and I certainly, you know, can say that if, if I got anxious because there was a thunderstorm going on, right, my dogs would pick up on that anxiety. And if I reinforced their behavior oh, you know, you're, you're, you're worried about a thunderstorm and I reinforced that behavior, they would start to learn oh, when it thunders, this is how I'm supposed to act, right, and certainly, you know, a kid falls, you want, you want them to be okay, but if you make a big deal about that, that's still a tension that kids crave, right, and so I, i think that we're. 

You know parents' anxieties about, you know, getting everything just right. You know the home has to be perfect. When we bring the little kid home, we have to protect them from everything because, lord help us if anything happens. You know there's been that kind of growth and it just keeps escalating and escalating. You know I grew, i'm a Gen Xer, right, you know, and you see, the Facebook means, hey, we grew up in the greatest generation, you know, we we jumped our bicycle over homemade ramps and stuff and we didn't wear bike helmets. 

And it's not that I think kids need to lose the bike helmets, but but our parents had more of a cavalier attitude to us growing up, you know. Whereas now you know we have to have the home filters that filter out the most miniscule you know, microscopic being, you know life, so that the kid can't any chance gets sick, when actually their exposure to that might actually be healthier. Right, You know, letting a kid fall, scrape their knees, not making a big deal about it, you know, might actually be better for their psyche, you know, versus, oh, we have to protect them. We have to make playground equipment that doesn't hurt. And again, i don't think we should design playground equipment to maim, but but there's, there's this like growing safety culture. You know that that, i think, is probably more to more the cause of that, you know, increasing anxiety about everything. 

1:29:59 - Speaker 2
That's a good point, because Jordan Peterson talks about how you have to let kids explore, because if they don't explore they will never learn boundaries themselves, and then that's kind of someday really vitamin They ask. 

1:30:13 - Speaker 1
yeah, absolutely, You know, and I think there is a lot to that. I think Jordan Peterson used the term like the, the engulfing mother, or the yeah, yeah, i think I know what you're talking about. Yeah you know where, where we're essentially, we over mother and and it. You know that is a little unfair, right? You know like, okay, we don't want to lay this all that women, right, you know that's not fair because men do the same thing, you know. 

1:30:44 - Speaker 2
But but yeah, i can have the opposite of the father not being involved enough, thinking that it's just a mom's job to be a parent and the father just has to provide when reality. The kid needs both. The kid needs that, yeah. 

1:30:56 - Speaker 1
And and you know, and certainly there are men out there, you know, i, i certainly see it as my in my role of the athletic trainer. If we have a kid that maybe has a lot of anxiety about getting hurt, i know that when I talk to the parent I'm probably going to be talking to an anxious person, right, you know, and and yes, it can be the you know, it certainly can be the dad, and it certainly can be the mom, and and it's not uncommonly both you know, but but yeah, it's that that is certainly out there, the older I've gotten the more that, like we realize, you take away all fictional characters out of your mind and every time you see a kid they're basically a reflection of the parents. 

Yeah, well, you know, but I'd learned Or adults. 

1:31:40 - Speaker 2
even I'm still a reflection of their parents. 

1:31:41 - Speaker 1
Yeah, kids, kids learn by modeling behaviors. Right, you know in, in, you know talk, talking about like. One of my struggles, of course, during the pandemic, was like just wearing mask. I was, i was like gosh, you know. I learned so much about talking by seeing. You know and and you know. So we even learned talking by modeling how, how the mouth moves, and that's why when you talk to a baby, you have such expressivized and such expresses. 

1:32:10 - Speaker 2
I'm curious to see what's going to happen with those babies that grew up in that area, especially at the ones that were zero to two years old and saw the parents wearing a mask. a lot possible. 

1:32:19 - Speaker 1
Yeah, And you know, and I don't want to make it a, you know, a masking, anti-masking, but it's like, look, there is a price to pay for these things. 

1:32:26 - Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, and I can't help but curious to want to find out what that result was, because everything that you change in a child's development has some change, let alone in the first zero to three years, which are like fundamental, that the kid developing the nervous system, the immune system, so many little things that develop in those three years, further and further that. 

1:32:46 - Speaker 1
But but you know to to to the point of, you know, parents who have anxiety sometimes, sometimes having to fake it till you make it type, you know, putting on that game face center or that brave face for the kid and, hey, everything's going to be all right. Yeah, you might be being consumed by anxiety about what might happen or what this injury might mean, but you know being, you know, and that that that's something that when I work with the athletic training students and like, look, there's going to, there are things that I've had to work with that terrify me, that that I feel sick about, that I'm I'm anxious about, but I got to put on this face, you know, so that the kid doesn't pick up on that, or so the parent doesn't pick up on that, and you know, and and hopefully it results in a better outcome and better mindset for both of the parents and the kids. 

1:33:39 - Speaker 2
I mean, you know, i remember, i remember in high school and I remember the way I looked up to you and you. 

You made your your little room to come into and get, get advice and help from you Just such a comforting, welcoming place and you had such an empathetic presence to you that I think you always had such a good job that, whether you know whether you're faking or not, i obviously you were going through rough times or those periods I was in high school and probably had interacted with you that, like you always showed, showed up for the kids, and that was something that consistently seen from you from beginning to end and even in college you had reached out to you because I was having sciatica issues and lower back pain and you at one point saw me and tried to help me a little bit. 

You, i'd reached out to you again. You gave me referrals to people to work with David Trinketa, trinketa, yeah, i saw him so many times after he gave me his. He was still the only PT I ever really go back to if I have any work done or some dry needling. So, like you, just been this person in my life. That's just been constant, constant support. And I am absurd and you've been there for other students and people just as much. 

1:34:45 - Speaker 1
So, yeah, well, this is what I do, this is what I am good at, and I'm glad, i'm very lucky to be in this community. I'm very lucky to have been here as long as I have, because, you know, if I had been moving around, that type of relationship might not have occurred, and it gratifies me to hear that I was very helpful, because that's what I try to be. I'm glad to know that I'm successful at that. 

1:35:13 - Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, yeah, without a doubt. So well. thank you so much today for letting me interview you and open it up and kind of tell me a little bit more about it. 

1:35:20 - Speaker 1
Thank you for having me. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. It was a pleasure, it was a lot of fun. 

1:35:24 - Speaker 2
Well, thank you guys for tuning in today and if you enjoyed, please subscribe and we'll hopefully get some more content out there for you guys. Do some more. Have a great day Hey thank you, thank you so much for this. Hey look, Hey, hey, hey, Hey, hey, hey. You have to yell at me not to, because you're going to have a quack intrusion if you go and play. 

I guarantee you're going to have a quack intrusion, you're not going to play for three more weeks after that And you have to talk me off. And I was so jacked to get back into the game And I feel like that's like kids almost missing that. 

1:23:40 - Speaker 1
They're missing that. 

1:23:41 - Speaker 2
Like I just want to get back out there. 

1:23:43 - Speaker 1
Well, and that's funny because when you started describing it it's like there are really. There are a few injuries where I'm just like no concussion would be one right, but a quad contusion was always one of my famous ones where it's like I remember in college we had a kid get a quad contusion and similar thing. He wanted to play and look, you can do all these things, go ahead, go out there and play And of course, what would happen would be, as you continue to run with that quad contusion, right, the blood clotting that's supposed to happen doesn't happen And because it doesn't clot, it continues to bleed and it continues to bleed into that fascial space. So now you have muscles trying to contract, you have a volume of blood that's in there that wasn't there before And it's not getting out of there. So now that quad has less and less space to contract, you know the pressure within the fascia can become so high that you can actually start to restrict blood flow to the rest of the muscle. And because of the pressure in the fascia is equal to that of your blood pressure, you know where it's a pressure differential to drive the blood right. 

Now we're not getting circulation. Now you're going to start getting muscle death And then that's going to cause a lot more problems. That's going to cause protein to leach into your bloodstream. It can cause your kidneys to eventually shut down if it got bad. And, of course, you know, the more immediate concern is well, we're not getting blood flow to the muscle. How are we going to save that? You know you need a fasciotomy. So so it's like yeah, no, john, you don't want to play with that. Buddy, trust me on this. You know, and you had to and I get it. But now it's the inverse, right? Hey, no, this is okay, buddy, you can get out there. 

1:25:40 - Speaker 2
Go ahead, you know do you think that's like? coming along with this does like anti-masculinity push? that's kind of happened through the last whatever probably 10 plus years that this is kind of been getting pushed. This agenda of like masculinity is bad. 

1:25:55 - Speaker 1
Well, not like. I don't disagree with that sentiment, right, Although I don't necessarily think of it as a like anti-toxic masculinity, right? And I see what people say when they talk about like toxic masculinity. Yeah, i look at the things that they describe and I say that's not masculinity. 

1:26:19 - Speaker 2
That's just asshole behavior. 

1:26:20 - Speaker 1
That's asshole, that's immaturity, that's insecurity. Yeah, you know that's, that's a lot of things, but that's not that's. that's someone trying to affect masculinity, right? Yes, you know, whereas masculinity is a bunch of different behaviors, but it's definitely, you know, different than you know, being too sensitive Or I don't know that I had the correct formation, but you know it's definitely not what. that is right. 

1:26:49 - Speaker 2
It's balanced. 

1:26:50 - Speaker 1
Yeah, masculinity is balanced, it's maturity, it's knowing that you've got to do something even if you don't want to do it. It's knowing your limits, you know. Certainly it's being, you know, qualities that can stretch across both sexes, of course, but certainly you know there is something to being actual, being a man, right, yeah, part of it, i think, part of it, i think, is just growing anxiety. You know, whether it's anxiety on the mom's part or it's anxiety on the dad's part, both, both certainly can suffer from and express anxiety, you know, and that anxiety getting transferred to the kid, right, you know where it's like this, i don't have kids, so I can't speak from, speak what it's like to be a parent, but I have pets and I certainly, you know, can say that if, if I got anxious because there was a thunderstorm going on, right, my dogs would pick up on that anxiety. And if I reinforced their behavior oh, you know, you're, you're, you're worried about a thunderstorm and I reinforced that behavior, they would start to learn oh, when it thunders, this is how I'm supposed to act, right, and certainly, you know, a kid falls, you want, you want them to be okay, but if you make a big deal about that, that's still a tension that kids crave, right, and so I, i think that we're. 

You know parents' anxieties about, you know, getting everything just right. You know the home has to be perfect. When we bring the little kid home, we have to protect them from everything because, lord help us if anything happens. You know there's been that kind of growth and it just keeps escalating and escalating. You know I grew, i'm a Gen Xer, right, you know, and you see, the Facebook means, hey, we grew up in the greatest generation, you know, we we jumped our bicycle over homemade ramps and stuff and we didn't wear bike helmets. 

And it's not that I think kids need to lose the bike helmets, but but our parents had more of a cavalier attitude to us growing up, you know. Whereas now you know we have to have the home filters that filter out the most miniscule you know, microscopic being, you know life, so that the kid can't any chance gets sick, when actually their exposure to that might actually be healthier. Right, You know, letting a kid fall, scrape their knees, not making a big deal about it, you know, might actually be better for their psyche, you know, versus, oh, we have to protect them. We have to make playground equipment that doesn't hurt. And again, i don't think we should design playground equipment to maim, but but there's, there's this like growing safety culture. You know that that, i think, is probably more to more the cause of that, you know, increasing anxiety about everything. 

1:29:59 - Speaker 2
That's a good point, because Jordan Peterson talks about how you have to let kids explore, because if they don't explore they will never learn boundaries themselves, and then that's kind of someday really vitamin They ask. 

1:30:13 - Speaker 1
yeah, absolutely, You know, and I think there is a lot to that. I think Jordan Peterson used the term like the, the engulfing mother, or the yeah, yeah, i think I know what you're talking about. Yeah you know where, where we're essentially, we over mother and and it. You know that is a little unfair, right? You know like, okay, we don't want to lay this all that women, right, you know that's not fair because men do the same thing, you know. 

1:30:44 - Speaker 2
But but yeah, i can have the opposite of the father not being involved enough, thinking that it's just a mom's job to be a parent and the father just has to provide when reality. The kid needs both. The kid needs that, yeah. 

1:30:56 - Speaker 1
And and you know, and certainly there are men out there, you know, i, i certainly see it as my in my role of the athletic trainer. If we have a kid that maybe has a lot of anxiety about getting hurt, i know that when I talk to the parent I'm probably going to be talking to an anxious person, right, you know, and and yes, it can be the you know, it certainly can be the dad, and it certainly can be the mom, and and it's not uncommonly both you know, but but yeah, it's that that is certainly out there, the older I've gotten the more that, like we realize, you take away all fictional characters out of your mind and every time you see a kid they're basically a reflection of the parents. 

Yeah, well, you know, but I'd learned Or adults. 

1:31:40 - Speaker 2
even I'm still a reflection of their parents. 

1:31:41 - Speaker 1
Yeah, kids, kids learn by modeling behaviors. Right, you know in, in, you know talk, talking about like. One of my struggles, of course, during the pandemic, was like just wearing mask. I was, i was like gosh, you know. I learned so much about talking by seeing. You know and and you know. So we even learned talking by modeling how, how the mouth moves, and that's why when you talk to a baby, you have such expressivized and such expresses. 

1:32:10 - Speaker 2
I'm curious to see what's going to happen with those babies that grew up in that area, especially at the ones that were zero to two years old and saw the parents wearing a mask. a lot possible. 

1:32:19 - Speaker 1
Yeah, And you know, and I don't want to make it a, you know, a masking, anti-masking, but it's like, look, there is a price to pay for these things. 

1:32:26 - Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, and I can't help but curious to want to find out what that result was, because everything that you change in a child's development has some change, let alone in the first zero to three years, which are like fundamental, that the kid developing the nervous system, the immune system, so many little things that develop in those three years, further and further that. 

1:32:46 - Speaker 1
But but you know to to to the point of, you know, parents who have anxiety sometimes, sometimes having to fake it till you make it type, you know, putting on that game face center or that brave face for the kid and, hey, everything's going to be all right. Yeah, you might be being consumed by anxiety about what might happen or what this injury might mean, but you know being, you know, and that that that's something that when I work with the athletic training students and like, look, there's going to, there are things that I've had to work with that terrify me, that that I feel sick about, that I'm I'm anxious about, but I got to put on this face, you know, so that the kid doesn't pick up on that, or so the parent doesn't pick up on that, and you know, and and hopefully it results in a better outcome and better mindset for both of the parents and the kids. 

1:33:39 - Speaker 2
I mean, you know, i remember, i remember in high school and I remember the way I looked up to you and you. 

You made your your little room to come into and get, get advice and help from you Just such a comforting, welcoming place and you had such an empathetic presence to you that I think you always had such a good job that, whether you know whether you're faking or not, i obviously you were going through rough times or those periods I was in high school and probably had interacted with you that, like you always showed, showed up for the kids, and that was something that consistently seen from you from beginning to end and even in college you had reached out to you because I was having sciatica issues and lower back pain and you at one point saw me and tried to help me a little bit. 

You, i'd reached out to you again. You gave me referrals to people to work with David Trinketa, trinketa, yeah, i saw him so many times after he gave me his. He was still the only PT I ever really go back to if I have any work done or some dry needling. So, like you, just been this person in my life. That's just been constant, constant support. And I am absurd and you've been there for other students and people just as much. 

1:34:45 - Speaker 1
So, yeah, well, this is what I do, this is what I am good at, and I'm glad, i'm very lucky to be in this community. I'm very lucky to have been here as long as I have, because, you know, if I had been moving around, that type of relationship might not have occurred, and it gratifies me to hear that I was very helpful, because that's what I try to be. I'm glad to know that I'm successful at that. 

1:35:13 - Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, yeah, without a doubt. So well. thank you so much today for letting me interview you and open it up and kind of tell me a little bit more about it. 

1:35:20 - Speaker 1
Thank you for having me. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. It was a pleasure, it was a lot of fun. 

1:35:24 - Speaker 2
Well, thank you guys for tuning in today and if you enjoyed, please subscribe and we'll hopefully get some more content out there for you guys to do some more. Have a great day, Hey thank you, thank you so much for this. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page