Resilience Development in Action: First Responder Mental Health

E.235 How Unprocessed Loss Fuels Burnout And What To Do About It

• Steve Bisson, Justin Jacobs • Season 12 • Episode 235

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When the lights are flashing and the clock is ticking, we train for everything—except the weight we carry home. We sit down with Coast Guard veteran and grief coach Justin Jacobs to unpack the invisible load of moral injury, the shock of losing the uniform, and the quiet ways unprocessed grief leaks into performance, relationships, and health. From the chaos of capsized boats to the stillness after a tough outcome, Justin names what many feel and few say out loud.

We explore how grief hides inside anxiety, depression, and burnout, and why so many transitions—retirement, reassignment, even a “first civilian job”—feel harder than expected. Justin explains decision fatigue after service, when structure vanishes and every choice suddenly feels permanent. He offers a simple reframe: plan early, expect detours, and treat course corrections as progress, not failure. Along the way, we draw clear parallels between the Coast Guard and first responders—rapid action, limited bench strength, and constant pressure to move on to the next call.

Most importantly, we get practical. Think “mental PPE”: a shared vocabulary for moral injury, short decompressions after hard calls, peer check-ins that don’t try to fix but do make space to feel. We talk about what genuinely helps the bereaved—curiosity, presence, honest permission to tell the whole truth about the person who’s gone—and what to retire forever, including hollow platitudes that minimize real pain. Justin’s own story of loss and growth brings empathy and precision to every tool he shares.

If you serve, lead, or love someone who does, this conversation is a field guide for staying human under pressure and building a culture that protects people as fiercely as it protects the mission. Listen, share with your crew, and tell us what “mental PPE” looks like in your world. If this resonates, follow, rate, and review so more first responders can find it—and subscribe for more candid, actionable conversations.

His Instagram is @manlygrief 

His Website is: http://www.manlygrief.com 


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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Resilience Development and Management with Steve B. Smith. This is the compass dedicated to first responder mental health, helping police, highers, EMS, dispense, and paramedics create better growth environments for themselves and their teams. Let's get started.ai.

SPEAKER_01:

You heard me talk about it. I'm gonna keep on talking about it because I love it. I've had about a year and a half, 18 months practice with it, and I still enjoy it. And it saves me time and it saves me energy. Free.ai takes your note, makes a trans what you're talking with a client, just press record, and it does either transcript, it does a subjective, and an objective with a letter if needed for your client and for whoever might need it. So for$99 a month, it saves me so much time that it's worthwhile. And if you do it for a whole year, guess what? You get 10% off. More importantly, this is what you gotta recover, because you are my audience that listens to Resilience Development in Action. If you do listen to this and you want to use free.ai, put in the code Steve50 in the promo code area, Steve50, and you will get$50 off in addition to everything we just talked about. Get freed from writing your notes. Get free from even writing your transcripts, use that to your advantage. Free.ai, a great service. Go to getfree.ai and you will get one of the best services that will save you time and money. And I highly encourage you to do so. Well, hi everyone, and welcome to episode 235. If you haven't seen episode 234 or listen to it, it was with Sarah Abbott. Please go back and listen to it. We have a history, me and Sarah. It was a great conversation, really appreciate it. But episode 235 is a returning guest and a returning, shall I even go, a friend, because we worked together on a very important project that I was really excited about. We unfortunately weren't able to get more funding on the subject, which was the Mindful Guardians. And I really appreciate it because I felt like I was being accepted in an environment that, again, I've never been in the military, and the Coast Guard really uh needed the support at the time, but it was so helpful. And hey, turns out Justin is a veteran of the Coast Guard, among other things, but I'm gonna let him decide what he wants to talk about. So Justin Jacobs, welcome to Resilience Development in Action. Thanks, Steve. Good to be back here with you. I was excited to hear you were like Blight, who was on a couple of weeks ago, said, you know, you should contact Justin. And I'm like, yeah, you'd be great. And you responded right away. I was so excited. So I'm so happy to have you on.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I appreciate it. You know, I was talking to my 28-year-old son the other day, and he said, Dad, did you ever think that you're gonna be a grief coach? He's like, No, there's nothing in my mind that as a kid or a teenager or even as an adult leaving the service, I was like, Yeah, I'm gonna be a grief coach someday. Because I did 22 years in the Coast Guard and decided I didn't want to do anything with that anymore. I was kind of bored, wanted to change, and uh did decide to get into professional coaching for leadership and transition uh for the veteran community here in the Washington, DC area, because at the time the Biden administration was spending millions of dollars on coaching. And I figured, yeah, I can do that. So fast forward a couple of years, and my wife dies of cancer, and Blythe, our mutual friend, uh has this grief coaching program and she says, Hey, do you want to be a grief coach? And I said, Absolutely not. I didn't have space to talk to anybody about their traumatic event or their grief because I I can't even take my own clients at this time. And so I went from life coaching to leadership coaching to transition coaching to now grief coaching. But the interesting thing that I found about all that is that they're all interconnected, they're all intertwined. Everybody has experienced grief in some shape, form, or fashion. Everybody is transitioning in life in some shape, form, or fashion. And anybody who comes saying, Oh, I want, you know, coaching on leadership, great, we can talk about that. And over a 12-week program, we'll probably talk about leadership once. Everything else is gonna end up being about life. But life is too woo-woo when you're just like, oh, I'm a life coach. Like, oh, here's your crystals and your chakras and your breathing exercises. Nah, I'm just gonna provide a safe space for you to talk about life in a way that you probably don't feel safe talking to anybody else about. And you're going to unlock stuff inside of you that makes you feel like you know what you need to do, maybe for the first time in your life. Right. And so, yeah, it's it's been a weird journey, but very happy to be here.

SPEAKER_01:

What I find interesting in what you just said is I find that grief is part of every session I ever do. And I go back to a guest who's been regularly on the show, Pat Rice. He argues that we don't have diagnosis, we only have grief. And most of what we go through is a form of grief, whether it's anxiety, depression, even trauma, it's the grief of all those things that are really truly what we're treating treating. And I always thought that was a great way to think about grief and mental health in general.

SPEAKER_02:

No, I like that. A student that I have in the the grief program, so the Blyth's program will take a person who has experienced a loss of any kind and may be stuck in that grief a little bit, who wants to work through that grief. But then if they also want to become a coach to help others, they can do kind of a dual track of going through the program themselves, but learning how to become a coach for other people. And one of my students was talking about the passing of her husband and you know, to cancer, and it's a horrible thing. But as we were talking about previous traumatic events, she kind of realized that, like, well, I moved around a lot as a kid and I didn't have like a family situation in a home where I felt stability because we would move in the middle of a school year and we'd have to leave family who we were staying with, and we'd have to make new friends. And I said, All those things were traumatic events. And if you didn't know how to grieve those properly as the child that you were, all that stuff came back up when you lost your husband.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_02:

And so the thing that's so strange about grief is that if you don't productively work through it in a way that your brain and body kind of like get used to the loss, it's just waiting for the next thing to happen to trigger it again.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. I agree. And you know, it's interesting because it sounds like there's a lot of things that led you to what you're doing today. You said you're you didn't see yourself as a grief coach, but there seems to be a lot of events that led you to being a grief coach.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. The one of the interesting things about transitioning out of the military, regardless of how many years you've been in it, is that everybody looks at it as a very simple process of do your paperwork with the government, get your disability rating, process out of the organization, build your resume and your LinkedIn presence, and go get a job.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_02:

What nobody talks about is the fact that it is a traumatic event. One day you're in uniform, you know exactly what to do, you know exactly where to be, you have your community, you have your purpose, you have your paycheck. The next day you lose the uniform, you take it off and you never put it on again. You lose your paycheck, you lose your community, you may lose the reason for getting up in the morning if if serving has been your purpose.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_02:

And so it's a traumatic event that leads to grief. And people talk about how you need to come down off the stress of being in the organization and it takes 12 months or 24 months to come back down to a new normal. And while I think that might be true, what they're not talking about is the fact that the brain's trying to make sense of the fact that you're not doing the thing that you did for however many years, and it's so completely different than what you are going to do in the future in the civilian side, that it it truly is a grief event. But we're not processing it as grief.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_02:

Uh, and so having gone through my transition and choosing positively to go into coaching, I feel that maybe I I processed that grief a little differently than some of my other brothers and sisters who've separated from service. But there was still a sense of loss. There was still a sense of like seeing friends on instant or on Instagram, social media, like posting stuff about work. I'm like, oh yeah, I I I miss that. And I don't miss that. Like I left because I wanted to, right, but I still miss it. It's still a part that defined me for 22 years. And so it wasn't until I started doing grief coaching that I realized that yeah, I probably needed to grieve that transition out of the military a little bit more, and now I could probably help somebody who's transitioning out of the military themselves to think about it in a different way. Like this is really freaking hard stuff because you're grieving a loss that you don't even recognize.

SPEAKER_01:

I agree. And I think that the I don't I don't mean to interrupt, but I'm gonna I wanted to add a little bit to it. Yeah, I talk about my first responders who retire. And as I the more I do talking about retirement with people, the more I do it like two years in advance prior to leaving the fire service, the police service, sheriffs, whatever, because it really takes that much time to prepare for that grief. And I feel like the other part too is you you get that what what you just talked about, I've heard about from the military, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what I've heard. When I was in the military, I had to be at this base at this time, and I had to fill fulfill until this time. And whatever decisions were made were made usually above me. So I just followed the order. I became a civilian and I had to make decisions for myself. I had to make judgment calls and not have someone say yay or nay to my decision. That's really a change. That's a mind fuck, if you really think about it. I don't know if that's what I'm not saying you personally, but maybe you can share you. But I think that's something that I've heard from my military folks. Am I completely off here? Or no, I think that's very accurate.

SPEAKER_02:

I think sometimes people who haven't experienced a hierarchical organization like the military or like first responders, where you give and receive orders, think that we're just kind of like robots that do what we're programmed to do. What I would say is certain decisions are made for you, like where you're going to be based, what work you're going to do while you're there, how you're going to dress, and all those kinds of things. But what that does is it removes the need to make decisions on things like what am I wearing today? What do I want to work on today away from you so that you can focus your decision making on more important stuff like how are we going to accomplish the mission today? What are we going to do to think outside the box to overcome this obstacle or this thing that's keeping us from success? How am I going to interact with the people who I'm responsible for to make sure that they're getting what they need to perform at peak efficiency? So there's a lot of decision making being made by the military member inside the organization that they're excellent at doing when they land in the right vocation after the military. The problem that I think the military member has is you separate from service and you're in, you know, whatever state, whatever location around the globe. And now it's like you decide where you want to go. Okay, well, maybe I want to go home, maybe I don't. Maybe I don't even have a home because I've been in for so long, no place really is home anymore. Do I need to go where the job is? Do I need to go where the kids will have a good school? Can I afford where that is? Like, and now all those decisions kind of start coming up and like crap, I don't know. Like I can do anything. And that's almost debilitating that I have all this choice. How do I refine the number of choices down to a manageable set that I can then decide what is right for me?

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_02:

And there's no playbook. There's there's no way to figure that out. And you're retiring from the military, you're in your mid-40s, right? You're a young person who has another 25-year career ahead of them if you want. That's a long freaking time. And you think that, like, well, I've got to make the right decision because that sets the trajectory for the next 25 years. If I don't make the right decision, then crap, this won't work. Well, 70% of the military leaves their first job within like the first six to 12 months because it's the wrong fit. They jumped into what was expedient and looked right, but then they get there and they realize this wasn't the right thing. And then they find the right thing afterwards, hopefully, and and then they start doing better at it. But yeah, back to the the original point. It's not that we can't make decisions, it's that we don't know what the right decision is because we've never been confronted with having to make that decision before. The last time we did was when we were 18 or 21, and we raised our right hand and took the oath. After that, it's kind of like, where am I going now? Where do we tell you to? Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I think that you you you hit something that you know, kind of like I don't when I never served, but if I served, I'd be like, Okay, what's what's my uniform? This is the uniform, this is what we're wearing today. That's what everyone's wearing. This is what we do on Tuesdays when we're in Mount Fuji or whatever. Um, there's no thought process there, you just put it on. Getting up in the morning and choosing from five shirts is really complicated. And I I go back to a French expressions, and I'm sure there's a good English expression. If you find it, please let me know. But the French expression is too many choices is like not enough. When people go to this Cheesecake Factory, they take a long time before making a decision because that menu is overwhelming. And that the same thing, if you go to some French restaurant with three choices, it's also as daunting because you get that wrong, everything's wrong. And I think that that's what you're kind of describing when you talk about the military system, and in general, any military-paramilitary decision making, and that's where the first responders fall. They're not quite military, but they're definitely paramilitary.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and you know, they're exactly the same way. Here's your uniform, this is what time you show up, this is the work you're gonna do. You're going to make a thousand decisions during the day about how to protect the public, rescue the person, put out the fire, like really wicked hard stuff. But you kind of have the bandwidth to make those really hard decisions because you had didn't have to decide, oh, am I wearing my blue shirt today? Oh, am I gonna wear the red one?

SPEAKER_01:

Like, yeah, no, I know what I'm wearing every day. Um, I I know for me, I know what I wear every day, something as casual as I possibly can. And just uh shout out to our conversation right before this. But yeah, no, I think that that's part of it. You know, like one of the things that again, I've been told, and you correct me if I'm wrong. Sometimes I've heard the expression that the Coast Guard is are the first responders of the military branch, and so you get a lot of like rescues, you get a lot of those things that you have to do because you're the Coast Guard. Am I wrong, by the way? Number one, and number two, is that what makes you kind of like understand a little more about the first responder world?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think the the Coast Guard very much is a first responder organization because bad stuff happens out there on the water, and it's the Coast Guard who's expected to show up and and fix it, whether that's a hurricane that's coming, an oil spill, search and rescue mission, law enforcement, drugs, counterterrorism, name the thing.

SPEAKER_01:

Capsize.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I mean, we're the only military organization that's allowed to function inside the United States uh without violating a ton of laws. And so we, you know, or that weird mix of like, yeah, we're military, we're kind of paramilitary also, and we're definitely first responder.

SPEAKER_01:

And that's go ahead.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, and so it was that connection to understanding what you know, I'm not a cop, I'm not a firefighter, I'm not a paramedic, but I understand the mentality of I'm out there serving the people who I live amongst in my community, because when bad stuff happens, somebody needs to show up. Right. And the trauma that a person doing that work undergoes while doing that job is exactly like what the Coast Guard's going through. You know, whether you're going to a house fire or a boat fire, if you're having to sift through the ashes to find the person hopefully still alive, it's the same kind of moral injury. I joined this organization to save life, and today maybe I wasn't able to save life, you know.

SPEAKER_01:

Which is really brings up the trauma that you kind of face on a regular basis, with you know, again, the Coast Guard and all that. I've I've been clear on this podcast, but I like to always remind people I've never served in the military, I have never been a first responder in my life. I'm a mental health counselor who's worked with both organized like those types of organizations for a long time, but I don't pretend I'm one of them. So sometimes I go, hey, I don't know. And it's okay for me to say that. But I think that with the trauma that the Coast Guard, and particularly I talk about, you know, I live in New England, there's a lot of cap-sized boats, and I know what those rescues can look like. And it's not like, well, the weather's not it's not it's bad, we can't go, we're gonna wait a couple of days. No, and they're they gotta go when they're called in, whether it's on a boat, whether it's on a helicopter, they go out. And you get there, maybe the person's good, person's dead, person has hypothermia, person's having a stroke, person, whatever. You it's a very unpredictable scene when you get there. And I think that that sometimes causes a little bit of trauma. And I know that part of grief is trauma too. Uh, you want to explain a little bit about that in the sense that how's your experience really helped you being a first responder of the military world and how to address that trauma for those first responders who may not know how to deal with it because you will face it whether you like it or not?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so you know, full uh disclosure, most of my career in the Coast Guard was not spent going out and doing that kind of work where I was rescuing the folks and seeing that firsthand. My job was actually trying to prevent that from happening by inspecting ships and facilities and treating the waterway kind of like a Department of Transportation treats a highway, so that we didn't have to go save people from a burning boat. We inspected it and the boat was fine. But the people that I worked alongside who did have to do that work, you could tell that there was nothing that the military did. There was nothing that the Coast Guard did to prepare them for the moral injury that they were going to receive from doing that work with the best of intentions, expecting that they'd get there in time and the person would be okay. And I think that the Coast Guard's a very small organization that is given a wide amount of latitude to do its job the way it sees better. Oftentimes without sufficient resources. And so we're very inventive and very quick. There's no bureaucracy when it comes to going out and saving life. That bias for action leads us to a hyperactive sense of like, okay, we got to go out and we got to do this thing right now. Okay, get it done, get it done, get it done. And we get it done. But then there's another accident, there's another hurricane, there's another bad thing that comes, and there's not enough time to take a breath before you're out there doing it again. And we get habituated to this idea of move as fast as you can, get out there and get the thing done. There's never time to like take a deep breath and go, okay, let's go process how we feel about the thing that we just got done doing. And unfortunately, because we're a zero-defect organization, you don't know that a person's been impacted until they get their first EUI, until they have their first domestic violence incident, until they have a full mental break. And then we find out that, oh, that's because of work that I did a decade ago that I never fully processed and worked out with a therapist or a mental health professional. And so those people are doing fantastic work and they're taking such a ridiculous mental toll that nobody knows about it until it's after the fact of the bad thing that happens that reveals, oh yes, it's because of this. And I'm sorry, I probably didn't even answer your question, but like But I no, I think you did.

SPEAKER_01:

I think that one of the things that I'm gonna gravitate towards, and I'll give you the full leeway of saying, Steve, I don't want to talk about this if you don't. But I will tell you that what you just explained, there's also where I feel leadership also says, okay, go to the next call, go to the next call, go to the next call. That's the first responder world. You have very few and far between leadership that says, listen, that was a rough call, get on the sidelines. You need a day, you need whatever. And that goes for the military and the first responder world, by the way. They're just like, no, go to the other one, go to the other one, go to the other one. I think that that plays a factor too, because that becomes an institutional trauma that is created. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, and it's hard to address that part unless you get the leadership to buy into it.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think even if you had leadership buy into this idea of the work we do is hard, we need to prep our folks to be ready for the traumatic event. Then we need to have post-event time to figure out what it is and what that did to the person. Sometimes it's just a matter of bench strength. If I take these three people or four people who are on this call out of the game because they all need to process this thing, I don't have sufficient people for the next bad thing. Right. Because the department's too small or the station is too small or whatever it is. And like, well, no, we still got to get it done. That's the job we signed up for. That's what we get paid to do. And so even though you're struggling because you had this really bad case yesterday, sorry, you got to go out again today. There's nobody else to take over. Right. And so leadership could be completely on board with like, yeah, we need to talk about this stuff, we need to process this stuff. Uh, and I'm still gonna make you go out when we need to.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. So let me then let me be uh devil's advocate here for a second. So if we know that part of this go, go, go mentality can cause, you know, long-term trauma, even long-term grief. Even if we have leadership on board, we're short staff or we have just enough staff and you still have to go out. How do you recommend people learn to deal with that grief or that trauma of some like it's not always PTSD for the record, it's trauma, there's a difference. But how do we teach people how to deal with that? Because some people like, you know, the old way, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is bury it as far as you can. Um, we saw how helpful that was when people came back from Vietnam. But anyway, that's just my two cents on my little message. So, how do we encourage people, knowing that the bench is is short, we don't have anybody else, but we want to encourage the process. How do we how can we do that?

SPEAKER_02:

So, this is kind of what we wanted to address with Mind Strong Guardians when we started it was let's give people a vocabulary for moral injury, for traumatic events, for all these things, because we'll spend millions of dollars on uh personal protective equipment, right? A firefighter knows how to don their their suit and put on their SCBA and go fight the fire. And if any of that stuff isn't on right, they can't fight the fire because the heat's gonna get them, the smoke's gonna get them, and they can't stay in the fight. But I don't know that we spend any money on mental PPE. We're not prepping them with vocabulary and an understanding of when you go do this work and you see this thing, your brain and your body are going to respond this way, and that's completely normal. It's not something to be ashamed of, it's not something to hide. It's something that when we come back to the station, the department, the whatever, everybody in the organization knows how to talk about this, not necessarily to fix, but maybe just event. Like today was hard. Like the thing I saw, I I'm messed up. Like, I hear you, and you're not alone. I'm messed up too. And this sucks. But maybe that's just enough of a relief that when the next siren goes off and the next call needs to be made, that it's just a little bit better than it would have been if it was like, no, we're all tough and we're all strong and we're just gonna bury it down deep and pretend like nothing's wrong. And tomorrow we'll go get shit-faced, you know, rinse, wash, and repeat.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_02:

And I think, you know, much to the conversation that you were having with Blythe on the last podcast she was on, this younger generation sees the benefit of mental health conversations. And when they're old enough to be middle management or senior management, I hope that they're capable of instituting preventative measures so that we have mental PPE and we spend as much time and money on it as we do all the other ridiculous training that you have to take in an organization like that. Because holy cow, like, yeah, it's all well and good for me to know how to put on my flash hood before I put on my mask and put on my SCBA. But if I'm not gonna be well because I'm expecting that every time I go out on a call, I'm gonna fight the fire and save the person and everything's gonna be okay. My brain's not gonna be able to function when it sees that's not true.

SPEAKER_01:

And I think that that's where I go with a lot of the stuff that we've been through in life, including myself, is we don't do the preventive work, but you talked about you did in the Coast Guard was a lot of preventive work. Uh, fire firefighters did that with you know, fire alarms and sprinklers and the whole nine yards. In the mental health world, I think that we fix the problem after it happened. We never do the prevention and the buildup for that. So that's why for me, what you just said is so important, not only for the military, but the first responder world. You know, that's why I advocate and run a business that talks about wellness visits. I talk about having peer support because you know, you don't want to talk to some schmo like me on a wellness visit or in therapy, then you have your peers. And if not, you have a crisis intervention specialist that can come and help you out when there is a big crisis and that everyone thinks, yes, we need to address that as a team. I think that what we need to learn to do is if we do wellness and we do preventative work, we're gonna have less need, and not that we won't need them, but we will need less therapists, less group, and less peer support because we're gonna address the PPE prior to it. I think that that's what mindful guardians wanted to do, and I think that that's what we need to do in the first responder world too. That's just my experience.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. You know, nobody in the military or first responder world has a personal trainer at the gym.

unknown:

Right?

SPEAKER_02:

They go to the gym, they work out, buddies show them different tips and tricks to maximize strength and agility and speed and all the other stuff. And, you know, you talk about it all the time. Like, hey man, show me how to do that that move. What give me a workout routine that's good for you? And no big deal, right? We're all talking about our physical health.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_02:

Wouldn't it be amazing if we could do the same thing with mental health?

SPEAKER_01:

If you expect me to argue with you, I will absolutely not. One of the things that I would say to you is part of it is, you know, I'm I share this regularly on my podcast. For those of you who want to speed up for the next 15 or 30 seconds, it's fine. But one of the things brought me to my job was losing my best friend when I was 12. And I was way alone in that grief for many years. And I don't blame my parents, I don't blame anyone in this world, it just happened. But I didn't get any of that support. So when people ask me why do you do this job? It's pretty easy. I never want anyone to feel that alone ever in any population, particularly my first responder world. But I think that everyone comes in with a personal story, and I know that you went into the Coast Guard, probably have a personal story on that. But more importantly, I think that becoming a grief coach probably has a personal story that goes with that. I know you talked a little bit about your ex, well, not your widowed. So talked about that wife and losing her. And I think that there's other stuff, but I just want to throw that out for you. See what you know if you want to talk about that.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I mean, I got into grief coaching specifically because I lost my wife to ovarian cancer in February of 2024. We thought she was experiencing perimenopause symptoms because that was the age that she was at. And for six months, it was getting a little worse and a little worse. And she finally went to the doctor and they said, Yeah, you have stage three B cancer, and we need to do a radical surgery to take all that stuff out, and then you need to start the chemo and radiation. And four months after the surgery, she was gone. And so it was it was a very quick decline. And so I was full-time caregiver and appointment maker and pill pusher and all that fun stuff. I had a junior in high school at home, uh, and our older son was living in the area. But what I what I found in that grief event of losing my wife was that it resurrected stuff from losing my dad when I was 11 that I don't know that I fully processed because I was 11. Like, how the hell does an 11-year-old process losing their dad? And one thing that probably pushed me towards working with Blythe was recognizing that no matter how many grief events you have in your life, you never truly get over them. You just learn how to process them in a way that doesn't make even it doesn't make it debilitating for the rest of your life. Uh, my therapist said that my first wife will be with me for the rest of my life. She will be an ever-present part of me. And I really didn't like it when she said it. It's like, I don't need a ghost following me around for the rest of my life. But for 19 years, she was my wife. And that means that, yeah, spiritually, physically, like however you want to describe it, we were an entity together. And to have a portion of me removed changes a person. And if you don't know how to talk about that stuff and process that grief, that is a debilitating thing that can end your life as well. I'm thankful that I have a fantastic support network of family and friends, uh, people who love me and care for me, and that I was very open and honest about the way I felt as I was going through those first months of losing her. And I feel that I did a decent job of processing my grief. Now, I still went out and sought out therapy because I realized that I wasn't doing as great a job as I thought I was. But like you, I felt horrible losing my wife and saw people who had lost their spouse and were in that same mindset years or decades later. And I felt so bad for them. I was like, I don't want anybody to feel stuck in grief like that for the rest of your life. And that's one reason why I decided to go in the direction of grief coaching, because I feel that I have done a good job of processing my grief, that I am healthier than I was uh after losing her. I got remarried. I graduated as a son from high school, he's in college now. I married off my other son, I moved houses. Like there's been a lot of churn in my life this last 12 months, but it's all really good stuff. And I think it's because I did really hard work, and I don't want anybody to feel like they're doomed to be stuck in their grief. You can get unstuck, you can have a life of joy again, but it's not easy.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, first of all, thank you for sharing that. Really appreciate you, and I appreciate you sharing that story. And I think that that's where strength comes from, in my opinion, is sharing your stories. I think that one of the things they teach us in counseling psych is to remove the person from the therapy so the other person can be themselves. Well, in fact, denying your who you are in a room is the worst thing you could ever do. And I'm sure that being a good grief coach, you bring yourself and your own grief that you've been through and you're still working on. It might be in the rearview mirror in some ways, but will never disappear. But really, really helps the people you talk to, and I give you a lot of credit for having a story like yours and being able to share it.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, thanks. Uh grief coaching specifically, I think, is the only kind of coaching where the coach should have the life experience of the client. I think in any other coaching situation, the less I know about you and the thing that you are coming to me with, the better, because then I can be curious and do a really good job of helping you figure out what you need in life. But specifically for grief coaching, if I can't come alongside you and say, I feel the pain that you feel because I went through the thing you went through, then there's there's a disconnect. Like, well, then how can you help me? You can't really help me through this thing if you haven't gone through it yourself. Because no one understands it until you've done it, until you've lived through it yourself.

SPEAKER_01:

I would argue that you're right. I think that we all go through grief. The more complicated grief like yours may not be the same. And I think that life experience really helps. I also believe firmly that while I've never had schizophrenia, I can work with people with schizophrenia, but I prefer working with people who, you know, I again, I don't steal any valor, I didn't do any of those things, but I've been on, you know, scenes. I've been out on, you know, the fires, the medicals, the mental health, and everything in between with the police. And having that hands-on experience makes me a more credible therapist, but more importantly, it makes me understand a little more. I don't understand fully, but I understand a little more. And I think that there's specific worlds where we need that experience. I don't need to have schizophrenia to understand schizophrenia, but that doesn't mean I fully understand it and I gotta be curious. I think I go back to what you said about grief. I think that I know a lot about grief, but I'm still curious as to how people go through grief. So I think that curiosity also goes with the grieving process, whether you're a coach or a therapist for that.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I agree with that. I think that regardless of the amount of grief that you've experienced, you've only experienced your grief. And grief is like a fingerprint because you're a unique person and the person that you've lost was unique and your relationship was unique. No other person had the same relationship that you did with that person.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_02:

And so I'll never understand a client's grief. I'll be able to speak to similarities in the way that I felt, or the idiot things that other people said trying to help me. But more than anything, I think it's just saying to the client, I don't understand what you're feeling, but I felt something similar. And here's something about my loved one that I lost that I can say honestly. And maybe it's the first time that that person's been given permission to say something that didn't deify or lionize the individual. Because people are complex and good and bad, and like there might be something about person that you lost that you're kind of glad that they're not around anymore because life's a little bit easier. Well, you can't say that to family and friends. No, but you can say it to a coach, you can say it to a therapist, and being able to be honest and tell your story about something is freeing.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. And um, I'm just gonna do a PSA here for everyone. When someone dies for whoever they forever reason, including the cat, the dog, whoever people care for, don't tell them they're at a better place because that's an insult to where they were next to you in your life. So that's never good advice. So just if you're listening to this, never say to someone they're at a better place. Because my first instinct when people say that to me, how do you fucking know? So just want to put my PSA moment here because I hear that too often and it just drives me wild.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and that's perfect. The best thing to say to that person who lost somebody or something that they care and love about is that sounds really hard. Death loss sucks. There's nothing good about it at all. That thing was here, that person was here, and now they're not, and I miss it, and it sucks.

SPEAKER_01:

And I'm my favorite line is when people say they lost someone, whoever, or even an animal, because people dismiss animals, but not me. I always go, I have no clue how you're feeling. I've had my own grief, but it can't be the same as yours. Tell me more about it. So I think that's another good way to kind of explain to people what we can go through and tell them. But as we approach the end of the time here, I can't believe we went on, we went really fast. I just realized that. How about you tell people what you're doing now? I mean, I'll never lose the the the dream of doing mindful guardians again with you, I'll be honest with you. But since we're not doing that right now, what are you working on?

SPEAKER_02:

So uh I'm a mentor coach in Blythe's uh grief to purpose program, helping take students through both their own grief process, but also training them up to be uh trauma-informed grief coaches.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay.

SPEAKER_02:

I hope to start working with first responders through a company that's gonna hire me uh to be a grief coach. They they kind of have a uh a 12-month long program with psychiatrists, therapists, peer recovery specialists, and uh and coaches. And so I look forward to working with first responders through that program. And then otherwise, I am still running my my own company, Manly Grief. Don't really have a website, but I'm on Instagram. And I'm taking individual clients for grief coaching. And uh yeah, that's that's most of what I'm doing right now.

SPEAKER_01:

I encourage everyone to go to his Instagram, always good stuff. I actually follow him, and you can check if I'm following him because it's the truth. But yes, Blight's program is really good, and I'm happy that you're doing that. Working with the first responder and having a program like you just talked about is so important. It's unfortunate because I was in the Virginia area of Washington, DC uh a few months ago, and I wish we could have connected. But at one point we're gonna connect again, I hope. Yeah, that would be great. But I'll put all that in the show notes, even though you don't have a website. I think follow him on Instagram, reach out to him for grief. He has experience, you haven't heard half his experience, if you ask me here. And as a helper, but also as his own life. So Justin, I I can't tell you how much I appreciate having you on again. Hopefully, we'll have you on again soon, and we can talk more about grief and what you're doing because that sounds super interesting with the first responder meeting.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I'm looking forward to it, and I appreciate being on the podcast again. It's always good talking to you.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I want to thank you and thank everyone who's listening for episode 235 with Justin. I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next episode. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00:

Please like, subscribe, and follow this podcast on your favorite platform. A glowing review is always helpful. And as a reminder, this podcast is for informational, educational, and entertainment purposes only. If you're struggling with a mental health or substance abuse issue, please reach out to a professional counselor for consultation. If you are in a mental health crisis, call 988 for assistance. This number is available in the United States and Canada.

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Steve Bisson

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