Rescued by the Light: With Jonathan Hickory

EP61-Rescued by the Light

00:00:00 Cinnamon: It's the first responder, the first to get the call, the first on scene, greeted by God knows what, pushed beyond the limits that they don't even set. Then what happens? You're listening to After the Tones Drop. We're your hosts. I'm Cinnamon, a first responder trauma therapist. 

00:00:26 Erin: And I'm Erin. I'm a first responder integration coach. 

00:00:31 Cinnamon: Our show brings you stories from real first responders, the tools they've learned, the changes they've made, and the lives they now get to live.

00:00:49 Erin: Quick heads up before we start. We want to acknowledge that some of the content we discuss on our show can be triggering for some listeners. Some of our episodes may touch upon themes like traumatic experiences, PTSD, suicide, and line-of-duty deaths. We understand that these topics are sensitive and might evoke difficult emotions. If you are currently struggling with your mental health or have experienced traumatic events recently, listen with caution. Now, if you're ready to proceed, let's begin.

00:01:22 Erin: Oh, well, we made it though. How exciting. So we had an annual planning retreat in January, right, Cin? 

00:01:29 Cinnamon: Yeah. 

00:01:30 Erin: And part of that little retreat together was we watched the Break Every Chain movie. 

00:01:37 Jonathan: I remember you telling me that. 

00:01:37 Erin: All the way down, I was listening to the book. So I wasn't like having dreams about you, but I could hear your story in my head, you know? It really- 

00:01:47 Cinnamon: Daydreams. 

00:01:48 Erin: Daydreams. But not like that, you know, but it really resonated with me so much. So I'm so glad that we finally can make this work. And I know it took two months to reschedule, but you were on it. And I appreciate that. 

00:02:01 Cinnamon: And I have influenza, there's no other barriers. And I think we, I did it reverse. I watched the movie first, and then I listened to the book. So Erin had listened to the book first and then watched the movie. So when she watched the movie, she was able to tell me, oh, there's gonna be more detail in this or whatever, but it was kind of nice to have the.... usually you read books and then you watch the movie and you're disappointed. And so to watch the movie first and then read the book, ending up more excited was a very nice experience. 

00:02:43 Jonathan: Oh, that's cool. 

00:02:45 Erin: I was also- 

00:02:46 Jonathan: That's good to know.

00:02:46 Erin: Yeah. And I could add, I was adding commentary. I'm like, that didn't happen. It didn't happen like that. 

00:02:51 Jonathan: Like the fight with the bad guy, like they weigh Hollywood that up and like who tazes a guy pointing a gun at an officer, by the way. 

00:03:02 Cinnamon: I do like Hollywood as a verb. 

00:03:05 Erin: Hollywooded. 

00:03:06 Jonathan: Yes. Yeah. They totally Hollywooded some of those scenes. We tried to do it close to the book, but you know, the script writer, Tim Sieerfoss, the director, he like, you know, took his own liberties with some of the creative liberties, but tried to remain true to the story. So I think he did a pretty good job for the budget that we had to work with. 

00:03:28 Erin: Well, it was an incredible movie and even better book. And so I will say welcome Jonathan Hickory, officer Jonathan, as we know you in the Facebook world, it is really exciting to have you join us finally. And I'm going to kind of tee you up a little bit, even though we're doing a lot less of that because a lot of this stuff is really about you sharing your experience and the mental health side is so important because well, we are a mental health podcast for first responders. And your story, one, I know Cinnamon and I could both really relate to and a lot of law enforcement officers can relate to that struggle with being that slave to addiction and alcoholism and the upsets that not only does the job create, but battling that conversation in your head about, I don't want to be doing this. 

00:04:24 Erin: I don't want to be drinking this. I can see outwardly that this is affecting my family and the people around me and I just can't stop. And it's such a big and important conversation to be having. So not only are you an award-winning author, you're a speaker, you're a police sergeant. And you have over 20 years of experience on the police force, right? 

00:04:46 Jonathan: Yes. Yeah. It's 21 years--

00:04:47 Cinnamon: Going strong. 

00:04:49 Jonathan: One day at a time. 

00:04:51 Cinnamon: That's all you got. 

00:04:51 Jonathan: Yep. 

00:04:53 Cinnamon: So you are a field training officer, right? 

00:04:56 Jonathan: Well, I'm, I guess I'm a field training sergeant now, but yes. I like I'll train other sergeants, but, but I spent several years of training other officers. 

00:05:06 Cinnamon: Yes. Yeah. So you are dabbling in a little bit of everything and because you wrote this book, Break Every Chain, somebody decided to pick it up and make it into a movie, which we found it on Prime, which was really awesome because we tried to watch it on YouTube, but it had too many commercials. And we don't have patience for that, but I want folks to know that if they want to- 

00:05:26 Erin: Nobody got time for that. 

00:05:26 Cinnamon: That's right. So your 21 years as a law enforcement officer, you have gone back and forth in various areas in terms of the struggles that you've experienced, like were you diagnosed, you were diagnosed with PTSD, correct?

00:05:41 Jonathan: I would say when I talked to a police psychologist, he said he would definitely say depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms, but we never went so far as labeling it as disorder. 

00:05:55 Cinnamon: Okay. Can I ask, do you think that that had something to do with not wanting to label you with that, or do you think that maybe you didn't meet the entire threshold of the criteria to get the diagnosis? Because I know that sometimes avoiding an actual diagnosis is more important than clearly labeling someone, at least, you know, earlier on.

00:06:24 Jonathan: I think that's a great question because I think it's a little bit of both. I believe that I would have qualified probably for the symptoms. If you've actually looked up the clinical requirement, I'm sure you both have. For PTSD, it's a very specific laundry list and it goes on and on and on. And so while I probably could have been diagnosed with it, I feel like I'm thankful that I wasn't, I'll tell you why, because I think once people are labeled like the word alcoholic, I don't like to call myself a recovering alcoholic, maybe a former alcoholic. Absolutely. But I'm no longer an alcoholic and you know, it's been nine years since I stopped drinking this August, nine years. 

00:07:09 Jonathan: And I'm very proud of that, but I don't think of myself as an alcoholic anymore. And I do realize that alcohol will always be something that I need to stay away from. It's, it's just common sense. Like if you have a gambling problem, you probably don't want to go, you know, just hanging around socially in a casino, right? Probably a bad thing. Why put yourself in front of temptation if you can avoid it. And so just to, you know, keep myself accountable to myself, I make sure that I stay away from, from alcohol, you know, just as a general rule, cause I don't want to ever have something have control over me and, and my life like that for so long.

00:07:50 Jonathan: So, post-traumatic stress disorder, that disorder, like that word itself is such a negative connotation. And I feel like once people feel like they're labeled with that, that they can't ever escape it, that they can't heal from it. And I'm sure you both know that you can heal from post-traumatic stress injury and you can get better and maybe you'll never completely shake that some of the symptoms, like, you know, when my kids, I was watching one of your... I know this is all over the place, but I was watching one of your social media grabs about a fellow who was talking about that when his kids would drop a dish from the dinner table on the floor, his reaction was so much better now than it used to be. 

00:08:36 Jonathan: And I still struggle with that stuff. Loud noises and you know, being around crowds and things, very uncomfortable. A loud noise that I'm not expecting will make me startle a little bit. And I can't control that. There's always still work to be done. That's my point, but I feel like I've healed so much from where I was to the point that I was coping with alcohol and addicted to alcohol just to survive and get through life. 

00:09:02 Cinnamon: So would you say kind of along the same lines of, you know, let's say I tear my ACL and I get the repairative surgery. I go through PT and I'm back up to par and I'm approved to do whatever I want. And do you feel like there's a comparison between having that mindfulness in your head and knowing like, hey, let's not try to hop one legged on that knee in gravel because even though it's recovered, there's still that in that makes it a little bit more susceptible to, if nothing else, aching after you're done hopping one-legged in the gravel.

00:09:56 Jonathan: Absolutely. That's a great analogy. Because if you know, now are you speaking about post-traumatic stress or are you talking about alcohol? 

00:08:36 Erin: I guess both. I think it applies to both. 

00:10:05 Cinnamon: I think both could be applied, but I was speaking specifically to the PTS. Because like you, I still struggle with exaggerated startle reflex. And, but I also know that my PCL5 score is down 50 points. Then, you know, when I took it not too long ago. So to me, it's kind of like having that the American Psychological Association is probably not making it a huge priority to change that D into something else. In fact, our priority is getting complex PTSD in the next DSM. And that at the end of the day is just our world, right? 

00:10:45 Cinnamon: And unfortunately, sometimes the world of insurance. But I think that if we recognize just like any other injury or, you know, diabetes is a disease, but you can also bring your numbers down if you're a particular type, right? So even with a disorder or a disease, there's always that space for remission and full recovery. Now that also, you have to keep in mind that you may be a little bit more susceptible to another episode of it, just, you know, like if you're hopping around in gravel. So if does that feel like it resonates as far as what you're trying to say in your language in the way that I would say as a social worker that has to use the DSM and the language provided by the APA. 

00:11:37 Jonathan: Yeah, I think so. Absolutely. I think that this is why it's so important. Like you said, being mindful of it. I know that, yeah, I'm damaged goods. I'm broken. Like I've healed a lot, but I'm not, and I'm, I don't feel like it affects me the way it used to, like I can sleep at night. I don't have nightmares. I mean, every now and then, you know, we all get weird dreams, right? I used to have all the anxiety dreams, the cop dream of the gun fights where your gun doesn't work that so many of us have. And now it's like, I'm at peace with myself, I think, and with my past and at peace with the things that I've seen. And so I sleep very well. I have no dependency on anything other than ice cream.

00:12:21 Jonathan: And I'll fully admit to that, but I also, I live a balanced life of resilience. And I think that's why it's so important to live that balanced life of resilience because you have to live in this constant state of being able to bounce back from that adversity that you might face. You never know, especially while you're still in this job, what's around the corner and it could be something in your personal life too. I mean, let's not discount. If you have a loss of a loved one in your family or something like that, trauma doesn't care if you're wearing a badge or a firefighter uniform or a headset or whatever, you know, when you're exposed to trauma, it doesn't care if you're on duty, off duty, you know, trauma is traumas. And so you have to be living that life of healthy coping mechanisms and resilience so that you can face it. 

00:13:13 Cinnamon: And part of your resilience and part of your healing and new awakening was because you stepped into your faith. You really leaned on your higher power to bring you out of that darkness, which I do think is important to touch upon because I know that's really important to a lot of our listeners is having that faith that there is an opportunity or something, someone there to pull them out of that because we know as people that are in recovery that we can't do it on our own.

00:13:46 Cinnamon: If we could, we would have. And so I do want to touch on the fact that as a result of the drinking and the trauma and just the domino effect of things that happened, there did come a point where you were contemplating taking your own life. And the reason that's so important is because, well, one, you didn't, so thank God for that. And also it sounds like you even developed some kind of class based on your own experiences to help with the resilience and the mental wellness and that suicide prevention. 

00:14:10 Cinnamon: And what's even cooler about that is that you're including the dispatchers and the jail staff and all of that too, all in one, which, you know, we've talked about it time and time again. It's like this like separate entity for each thing, forgetting that all of you are experiencing trauma no matter how your job looks. So one, it's so great that you were able to lean on God and be able to trust that he would bring you out to that you took your, your pain and your struggles and your experience to create this, this program. Is it a program? Is it a, can you give me a little more information about that? 

00:15:00 Jonathan: Sure. There's a couple of different things I do. Number one, there, I have a class that I teach at our regional academy, which is a several different police departments and dispatchers and jail staff attend this regional academy. I don't know if it's in the hundreds of departments, but it's a lot of smaller departments and mid-sized departments that participate at this regional academy. And so it is a class that you can sign up for a standalone class where if you're interested in learning more about mental wellness and resilience and suicide prevention, then you can sign up for the class as a standalone class. 

00:15:37 Jonathan: They've also snuck it into in-service weeks where that's happening less and less where I think a lot of us will do the stuff online to get our research credits, but you know, they've kind of snuck it in there to the older folks who still want to go to class and I've dealt with the, a lot of guys will open up and it's wonderful and then there's a few people that'll cross their arms and don't want to be there, maybe leave at lunch because they don't need the credit hours or whatever, pretty rare, but the stigma is still there, you know, the suck it up, other cog mentality that's kind of prevailed in law enforcement and the firefighter world dispatches all of the first responder communities. 

00:16:19 Jonathan: Same as the military, you know, it's the same time, but type of stuff. The stigma is very alive and well, right? Cause we're supposed to be tough. I also very soon I'm going to be sharing my story with the basic academy class a few weeks before they graduate. It's just like a two hour block, and it won't be talking about the movie or the book or anything, but I have a PowerPoint of some slides, some pictures of my dad, you know, um, who passed away when I was 12. Some pictures of me as a younger officer, you know, all the good things happening in my life and then how it went horribly crashing down because I sucked it up, buttercup. 

00:16:58 Jonathan: I started stuffing all my trauma, which piled on top of the trauma from my childhood and that was never resolved. And so me, teaching about this to these brand new baby faced recruits. I'm hoping that I'll have a chance to make an impact on them. I have this neat little exercise that I do to kind of break the ice between myself and the students when I start one of these classes, I'll take a tennis ball and how make a little game out of it, an ice breaking game where I'll throw the tennis ball to the student. And they have to tell me a little bit about themselves, you know, if it's a veteran class, how long we've been in law enforcement, where they work. 

00:17:41 Jonathan: And then no matter who they are, they have to tell me their name, but they also tell me two things they do in life to stay resilient. And so that opens up the conversation about like, what's your why? What's your passion? What's your therapy? You know, God and faith can be a big part of that and should be, but, you know, there's other stuff here on earth that we can do to get out into nature and, you know, to make sure that we're being physically fit and connect to our bodies and get out of our head and get into our bodies. Go for a hike, you know, paddle boarding, motorcycle ride, bike ride, quilting, art, whatever you're, I always throw quilting in there as a joke, but that's the mad skills you need that. Right. You guys both look like you might have some knowledge there. I don't know. 

00:18:28 Cinnamon: Well, and quilting, I'm from Amish country and I'm just going to leave it at that. 

00:18:31 Jonathan: Hey, awesome.

00:18:33 Jonathan: All right. Some truth coming out. 

00:18:35 Cinnamon: There's a lot of quilting going on in my village of origin. 

00:18:40 Jonathan: Awesome. That's cool. 

00:18:41 Cinnamon: And indeed it is a village.

00:18:43 Jonathan: Mad respect. Cause those kinds of skills are lost, you know, and I think a lot of people don't know how to do that stuff anymore. So, I mean, like knitting and crocheting, it sounds so like maybe not the type of thing that I would want to do, but I think that the people that have those skills, I have a lot of respect for them because it takes a lot of patience.

00:19:03 Cinnamon: Well, it's interesting because I used to, in a past life slash occupation, I would facilitate groups for women who were in residential long-term treatment programs. And one of the things that they were like permitted to do in group was to knit or crochet or anything with their hands because it helped them listen better. 

00:19:31 Jonathan: Oh yeah. That makes sense. And so, so getting back to like this game I do with the tennis ball, you know, we open up the conversation of the importance of not forgetting the things that you do in life to stay passionate about life. And so we talk about that. The rule is I throw in the ball and they have to throw it back to me. And so there's like coffee cups flying everywhere. People have fallen out of their chairs and they can't pass it to the next student. It has to come back to me. And then I throw it back to them. They're all sitting like very far away from me at times. So it gets interesting. 

00:20:03 Jonathan: But the illustration is that the ball is bouncing. Right. So in this way, later on in the class, I'll take, you know, an egg and I'll hold it up and I'll say, you know, we've been working with this ball. And the idea is that you bounce back like this ball by living a life of resilience. You bounce back from these traumas by talking to a counselor or a therapist or a psychologist. If it gets that bad and you're having the effects, because if you don't, this is what happens and I'll hold up an egg and drop it from, you know, face height or whatever, and of course it's in a bag. Okay.

00:20:40 Cinnamon: It's going to say, [inaudible].. the janitorial staff does it.

00:20:45 Jonathan: They hate me. The janitors hate me there. I don't know why. No, I put it in a Ziploc bag and I'll even put it like in a sandwich bag inside the Ziploc bag, just in case. And I'll drop it and of course it splats and it's a big mess. I said, this is what happens when you don't face your trauma. If you just decide that you're just going to stuff it and don't do anything. It makes a huge mess. It gets all over everything and everyone else and you are not able to recover as quickly. So I think it's a fun way to talk about trauma and the effects it can have on you if you don't face it. 

00:21:19 Cinnamon: Brilliant. And we love a good metaphor. 

00:21:22 Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. 

00:21:23 Erin: Do you feel like it lands with them? Like they actually get it. 

00:21:27 Jonathan: Yes, absolutely. I think they are. Everyone wants to know what the heck you're doing with an egg and why are you holding it? You know, it's always good to have visual tools because a lot of times in these trauma classes and mentally in resilience classes, you're talking about what's post traumatic stress, what's depression, what's anxiety, like the amygdala and all this stuff that they're like, they don't know what the heck you're talking about. 

00:21:55 Erin: It's decent. He said it.

00:21:55 Cinnamon: Erin's constantly telling me they don't care about that part, Cinnamon, they're not geeks like you. Just give them what they need to know. 

00:22:02 Jonathan: Yeah. I think some people do want to understand the science behind it. I was actually fascinated by the, the studies that have been done with your, the ACEs score and how much it influences the possibility that somebody might become addicted to substances or might be more likely to be facing depression and anxiety and the more likely they are to have suicidal ideations. So we always want to normalize ourselves. We always want to like say, Oh, that's why I'm screwed up. You know, and I think that really helped me to know that it doesn't mean you have to have childhood trauma, but there's definitely a link there. 

00:22:43 Jonathan: And so for me, never facing the loss of my father after watching him battle cancer for 13 months, you know, watching him die in our home. That was extremely traumatic and I don't think I realized how much I carry that with me every day. 

00:23:00 Cinnamon: Do you think part of like that not realizing, because one of my favorite things to talk about is adverse childhood experiences. And one of the challenges that I have, whether I'm talking to somebody about it in an individual session or I'm speaking on it is, the way the questions are formulated is, during the first 18 years of your life, did you feel? And it's like, even though people hear what I'm saying, what they register is, as an adult looking back, do you think you were loved, right? Or do you think you were protected? And so I get an answer that doesn't speak to the actual question that I ask.

00:23:48 Cinnamon: And so for you doing the work that you were able to do, when I hear you say, I don't think I realized how much of an effect that had on me, that sounds like answering the question that I don't ask. And so what was the thing, whether it was an epiphany or a support person or a professional that helped you recognize they're not asking me what I think about my childhood as I reflect on it today? But they're asking me to put my, you know, smaller size shoe on, my smaller size clothes on and remember what it was like being that kid and how it was affecting me then what was it for you that helped you make that connection that you had maybe been coming at it in a way that wasn't as beneficial to help you acknowledge what it was. 

00:24:39 Jonathan: Well, it's hard to talk about that because we haven't talked about the entire backstory, which would make take a little while to share. So I'll just kind of give you, you know, the three second version. So, you know, my father dies when I'm 12, you know, and I remember, you know, just a little tidbit of that is that we went on a slush vacation sponsored by his employer and to Disney world. I thought it was awesome. We'd never been there for kids in the family. And, but it was like this best suckiest vacation ever because it's like, this is your last vacation with your dad. He's going to die. There's nothing you can do about it. 

00:25:17 Jonathan: So enjoy Disney world, you know? And so, you know, to this day, like, you know, we always talk about smells triggering us and stuff. I remember that for some reason, Pert Plus was a, the shampoo that I was using on that trip and to this day, like if I smell Pert Plus, like I'm right back there at that time in my life, you know, at the same time that my father was fighting cancer, he also was fighting to clear his name from a huge lawsuit against him and his new employer. His old employer actually laid him off after 19 years. He was a organic, an engineer in organic technologies and abrasives. You know what that is, right?

00:25:58 Cinnamon: No.

00:25:58 Jonathan: No, I don't either. 

00:26:01 Cinnamon: No, he doesn't.

00:26:02 Jonathan: He did very well. He was very smart. He was a Tufts university professor for awhile. But he worked for a large company in Massachusetts, developing grinding wheels, fan paper, and those types of industrial abrasives. I think that's what led to him getting cancer because the baking process of grinding wheels actually has been shown to lead to cancers, asbestos and all that stuff. So when he was fighting this lawsuit, his former employer was accusing him and his new employer of stealing trade secrets.

00:26:38 Jonathan: It all turned out to be publicly available information and he was, you know, his name was cleared, but he died two months later, so he was having to leave the stand to go throw up and stuff. I know you guys read the book. So...

00:26:50 Erin: But the listeners haven't yet. 

00:26:51 Jonathan: Yes, you're right. I'm sorry. So it was just like to face that as an 11 year old boy and to see your dad losing his hair, his body being destroyed. And I think that's why I'm not secure in my baldness yet is because my dad lost his hair when he got cancer. He tried wearing a wig for a little while and it weird, it was kind of weird, but like to watch him waste away and to watch him fighting for his good name. And then, and you just don't understand this stuff when you're 11, you know, I think that's the thing with we think back of ourselves and we're like, oh, when I was 11, I had a good grasp on the world. Didn't I? 

00:27:37 Jonathan: And so, you know, like that's, you know, I thought of God as this magic being, the old white, white haired guy in the sky that would, you know, I could pray to, and he was going to make everything okay. And then he didn't. And so that really affected my, my fledgling faith journey as well. And so as I moved forward in life, after my father passed away, now that looking back, you know, I was bullied. I had low self-esteem, no father figure. I mean, there were some father figures in my life. They were okay, but nothing can replace that relationship. No reaffirming, you know, you're a good son. You did a good job. You know, I'm proud of you. That was all gone now. 

00:28:23 Jonathan: And so, you know, as I moved into, my later years in high school, there was road raging behavior, anger was a huge theme in my life and just reckless driving and things like that broken relationships with young women that I thought that I could fix. You know, it's, I think that's when we're broken ourselves, we're like, Oh, I know what's a good idea. I'm going to go after this girl that's got all these issues and I'm going to fix her because you know--

00:28:53 Cinnamon: [overlap] about myself too. 

00:28:55 Jonathan: There you go. Exactly. So, you know, there were broken relationships, I was job hopping. I signed up for 17 credit hours, my first semester of community college in engineering, cause I was going to be like my dad and then I just stopped going to school, you know, there was no teacher. 

00:29:12 Erin: Who wouldn't? That's some overwhelm. 

00:29:15 Jonathan: It was too much. 17 is a lot, but you know, I'm like, oh, well there's no one that's going to call me and say you didn't come to class. There's no consequence. So whatever, you know, so I failed all my classes, my first semester. And, you know, I would go back later and fix it, but it's signs of depression, you know, signs of this kind of behavior is not normal, but that's all I knew. And so, you know, even watching like the Lion King, you know, when I was 30 years old, I would start to tear up when Mufasa dies because it's sad and it's a dad leaving his son. And I still like just talking about it now, I am, you know, get emotional. 

00:30:01 Jonathan: And so this was never resolved with me. I never talked to a counselor before about it. I know. And I don't know that I was ready to honestly, Erin and Cinnamon, like I don't know that I was ready to receive what they wanted to tell me. I remember my mom tried to get me to talk to some counselors around 17 years old. And at that point it was, I already know everything, you know, I'm an expert at literally everything. So you cannot help me. 

00:30:31 Jonathan: But after, you know, several years of police work and my life was in shambles, my marriage was in shambles, the toll of the job and also personal trauma with losing our second child in five months into our pregnancy, these things broke me so badly that in the years of alcoholism, I mean, I don't even know how long I was addicted to alcohol, but it was probably seven, eight, nine years that it started to rule my life more and more to the point that I couldn't sleep without it, that I would have withdrawal symptoms, feel like bugs were crawling on me if I did not drink. 

00:31:11 Jonathan: And so I had it really bad and I tried to quit several times to be a better father or husband, and I just couldn't, could not. So, finally, I get to the point where after the tragic loss of our child, I... again figured I would just fix it myself and not talk to anyone because we're tough, I'm a tough guy, I'm a tough cop. And I don't need anyone else to help me. Cause clearly I was doing so well. And you know, and so that's when I really started going off the deep end. I call it self-destruct and I think, post-traumatic stress, untreated will lead to self-destructive behaviors because you start doing things. 

00:31:51 Jonathan: It was very strange. If you don't talk to a counselor about something traumatic, then your brain, your screwed up post-traumatic stress, broken brain will start thinking thoughts that it wants to. I'll give you an example of that. I started to associate the death of this child with my wife and that's so unfair to her and that's heartbreaking to hear. But I wasn't getting any counseling for it. And so I couldn't speak to her. I couldn't look her in the eye. I couldn't be in the same room with her. And that's ridiculous. And so, you know, it really affected our relationship, which was already in bad shape and that's all my fault. 

00:32:32 Jonathan: That's when real reckless behavior started. We're talking about affairs and just like going to calls that I shouldn't be going to alone on the job, going to calls that are high risk with a weapon, firearm and maybe not even having a vest on because I wasn't training that day and, and whatever. And so things like that, where I just didn't care who I hurt. I didn't care who suffered. I just wanted to feel better and live the life I wanted to live. And from a faith standpoint, at that time, when I lost the child with my wife and I did, I think I started to question the existence of God. 

00:33:12 Jonathan: And that's a scary thing because... oh, there's one thing. Believing in God is comforting believing God and what he actually is doing in your life, that's a whole nother thing. It's different believing in God and believing God, different things, right? Whole different level of relationship and believing God. But at that point, I still believed in God and I felt like, well, if God does exist, he totally sucks. He took my dad from me and he took my firstborn son from me. And so, again, it's a rational thought, but it's where you go when you feel hopeless. 

00:33:49 Jonathan: When you're in the middle of this storm, like a sandstorm, like a heavy downpour where all you can see is two inches in front of your face and you can't see anything else, any hope, any light, that's where I was for a long time, 18 months. And at the end of this 18 months, I get pulled into IA and I get told that I'm being investigated for conduct on becoming of an officer. I've never been in IA a day before of my life before this. And I knew I was going to lose my job. I knew I was going to lose my wife because it was over the affairs. 

00:34:25 Jonathan: I knew that I was done. And so that's when I was going to end my life. And you know, I didn't, and I'll say that the reason I didn't is because I saw a vision of fire and it scared me. I thought I was going to hell straight to hell. And that was enough to snap me out of it to the point that I started thinking, okay, maybe that's not the answer. Maybe like, if you do that, people are going to suffer. Other people are going to suffer and there's no, there is no, like definitely no second chance, but I still had no answers. 

00:34:58 Jonathan: And so that's when I started to go talk to a police psychologist, my commanding lieutenant, I went to him and I said, like, I need, I don't know what to do. I'm being investigated for something and I feel like I'm going to lose my job. And he told me to go see the psychologist, you know, he took a leadership step that I never would have. I never would have done it. I never even thought of that as a choice. And so like Lieutenant Mike Wagner, you know, he is now a chief, you know? So his leadership saved me. And then once we hit marital crisis later on, a few months later, because I never told my wife and that's my own fault.

00:35:45 Jonathan: We started to go see a marriage counselor who was faith-based, a Christian counselor. And she was wonderful. And I figured this marriage counselor, like my wife had every right to leave me walk away from me at that point. And you know, sometimes I still wonder why she didn't, but I'm so thankful for her grace. But we went to see this marriage counselor and I figured it would be all about the marriage, you know, of course, right. All this, it's all the marriage, you know. But no, it was, it was all about me and my wife just happened to be there. 

00:36:15 Jonathan: So that was when we started to go all the way back to my childhood and like talking about the death of my father and the fact that I would empty out his urine bottle. Cause he couldn't get out of bed when he was two months away from death. And it was... she looked at me after I told the counselor, you know, the first session, they're like, you're writing all these things down. And, or iPad, she had an iPad. So I finally finished her telling her all my... how screwed up I was, starting in childhood. And she looked up and said, wow, I'm really surprised that you're doing as well as you are. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Like I'm a train wreck. There's worse. You've seen worse. So that actually helped me feel a little bit better that I was kind of doing okay, but not really--

00:37:07 Cinnamon: You're like a six or a seven on the scale when you thought you were a 10, come to find out you're a six or a seven. 

00:37:13 Jonathan: Come to find out. 

00:37:15 Cinnamon: But I feel like that also implies that there's hope. That one, it's the validation of like, okay, so this makes sense. And okay, so if I'm not the worst of the worst, I know I feel terrible and this is awful, but that means that there is hope that I can come out of this. I mean, that's what I hear in that response. 

00:37:33 Jonathan: Yeah, no, it gave me a little glimmer of hope when I felt completely hopeless. I thought it was, I still wondered if my wife would leave me, you know, she, I didn't deserve a second chance with her. And you know, I don't glorify anything that happened as far as the affairs, but I think that it's one of those things where you don't want to talk about it because you're ashamed, but it's so much worse than, you know, the movie portrays, you know, and it's so much worse. Like the reality is that... that is so much worse. And, and so like she had a lot to process and. You know, we had to work through that and it was very difficult. 

00:38:19 Jonathan: And I thought that we would never recover from it. And so I was doing everything I could to try to rebuild trust, you know, by just completely being humble and acting in humility and trying to serve her, make her breakfast, share the... find my friends on the iPhone or whatever, so that she could track me. Anytime she had full access to my, she still has all access to passwords of email and my lock code for my phone and just anything I could do to completely be transparent to try to help restore that trust and even doing all those things, she didn't ask me to do that, but trust takes time to rebuild. And so if your heart's in the right place and you can turn away from like the original sin and the wrongdoing and you can come together towards a place of healing, then there is hope. But the best apology is change behavior, right? 

00:39:28 Erin: Yeah, 100%. I want you to know this and maybe I've, I don't know, I think I have sent you a text or something on social that the movie, because it's such a quick thing, it's not like hours that it takes a book. I've had, I work with a lot of wives and I've had them watch the movie because one, I want them to see it from their first responder side. Like I want them to be able to see they're not crazy. I mean, they didn't get hijacked, well they did. They're still in there and there is hope. And also to see that, the remorse that you had, of the pain that you were causing your family. Because I know that they feel so helpless and so hopeless and they love their responders. 

00:40:13 Erin: And it's like, they turned into a jerk overnight. I don't know who they are anymore. I get a glimpse every once in a while. I think they hate me, all of these things. And so the movie has come in handy several times where I'm like, you know what, go watch this. Cause I want you to see it from now, I know it's like Hollywoody or whatever you said it was, but it's still the principle and the message is clear like this wasn't something you were actively choosing to do just to be a jerk. This was something that was much bigger than you. And that also you did find God, you did find recovery, you did find healing and therapy. I don't want to forget that one. And so there is hope and you came out, this wonderful husband and successful author. 

00:41:01 Erin: And you are now running around being an advocate for other people, dropping eggs and stuff. I mean, this is like, you know, a big thing that your message has provided hope, not only for the responders, but also for the spouses too, to see. Yeah. And you can tell your wife that too. 

00:41:20 Jonathan: Well, you know, in the latest version of the book, she actually wrote an epilogue in the back and talks about like, why they would that guy and all. So it's not, it's like maybe, I don't know, 12, 15 pages, that blog, but that was something she was brave enough to do. And so, you know, behind the scenes we've had a lot of interaction with a lot of first responder couples that are struggling, whether it's addiction or infidelity or, I mean, cause it's like, it's always the same stuff. You know, we can't turn to illegal drugs because, you know, that would be a deal breaker as far as our employment. So it's usually alcohol, it’s usually sex or gambling or addictive processes. 

00:42:05 Cinnamon: Anything that will numb you, anything that will numb you. 

00:42:10 Jonathan: Right.

00:42:10 Cinnamon: And then you add in that high risk behavior, you know, the adrenaline of, like not getting caught or like it's so tied together. The first time I ever had to tell a spouse, like the infidelity is not about what you think it's about and had to explain it as a PTS symptom, like that didn't go over very well. I've gotten more, you know, better, but it's recognizing that it's a tool, a very unhealthy maladaptive tool, but it's one more way that we can get high on that inner chemical system and the way that we can numb out. 

00:42:49 Jonathan: Right. And it's almost like, the problem is that it's almost like, culturally accepted in the first responder world. You know, not only the drinking culture, but also the, I'm going to say womanizing culture from the, obviously law enforcement is still a larger percentage of males, but you know, so it can go either way, obviously though, but just the, in, unfaithful, you know, to your spouse culture is I'm not saying it's promoted, but we turn the other way. You know, we, okay. Well, you know, he deals with a lot. So whatever helps him, whatever, you know, so.

00:43:31 Cinnamon: It’s not my place, not my family, not my business. 

00:43:34 Jonathan: And it's hard, you know, and, you know, post-traumatic stress should never be used as an excuse for any of these behaviors, you know, like we need to get to treating this stuff for what it is instead of, you know, but instead of turning to unhealthy behaviors and it will continue to happen obviously, but I think that as the, I'm sure that you have both seen in the past 10 years, slowly things are starting to change. It's not fast enough and never will be, but it takes time to adopt new culture and new ideas and new ways of looking at things. And so I do think that we're making a difference. You know, whoever thought there would be a nonprofit that tracks police suicides, you know, even those are way under reported still. So just talking about it is a big game changer in itself. 

00:44:30 Erin: Definitely. And the fact that you said that you are taking this two hour presentation to the new recruits, I was like, tear, because that's all we talk about is it being proactive and this information being brought right at the beginning. So even if it's two hours, it's two hours more than y'all once got from what I understand. 

00:44:50 Jonathan: Right.

00:44:50 Erin: And that matters. So that's something I was gonna ask you. First of all, thank you for, like the kind of, like Cliff's Notes version. 

00:44:59 Jonathan: Oh yeah. 

00:44:59 Erin: How in the heck did you go through all of this? And then all of a sudden you're like, I'm gonna write a book. How did that happen? I wanna definitely touch on that a little bit. And was that a therapeutic process for you as well? So that was a couple of questions. 

00:45:14 Jonathan: Yeah, no, that's a great question. So first of all, one of my therapies was to go to a men's group, a men's Bible study group. But we did more than just Bible study. We talked about… we prayed for each other. We talked about life. And I remember going to this group for the first time and I wrote about this in the book, you know, like, and it's, all these guys are, like hugging each other and I'm like, what is wrong with these? Like what kind of group is this bunch of hippie? Like, you know, that's where my head space was, you know, such a cynical hardened person and, but there was a side of me that's like, well, I want to bro hug. 

00:45:51 Erin: But I don't want to tell anybody I want to bro hug. I'm just going to sit here and judge and be sad that I didn't get one. 

00:45:55 Jonathan: We all need hugs. We need hugs. But yeah, I remember like one guy even was wearing, like he was barefoot and we were like in this little clubhouse to a neighborhood. It was summertime, but I was like, what is this guy doing barefoot? Like, and then I see, like this big knife at his feet and like, Oh, is he going to like hack us all to pieces or something? Like, do I need to go get my gun? Like, there was a watermelon and he had brought this big knife to cut it. Like that's all I could think of is, suspect threat, you know, whatever, you know? 

00:46:26 Jonathan: So, but that was super helpful to me. This group therapy aspect, I went to this group for like six years and just, it helped me to realize that we're all broken, that everybody's got stuff in their lives. We've all got stuff going on. We're, no one is perfect. The highlight  reel you see on Facebook is a load of baloney. It's total garbage. Like we all struggle. And so to see some real life from these other men was great. But after, one of the happier things, obviously in my story is that after I started to heal, after there was forgiveness in my marriage from my wife and our relationship began to heal, we did give birth to another baby boy. After losing a son and Zachariah, who's now seven and a half, he was born. 

00:47:18 Jonathan: We prayed all the way through his pregnancy to kind of cover that because we were so petrified that something bad was going to happen as far as with the previous loss, it was like, you know, PTSD from that. And so after we were rejoicing that he was born healthy and, no complications with the pregnancy at all.  And there was a guy in my group that said, brother, I feel like you're going to write a book and I'm like, what? It's like, what? Like brother, I feel like you, smoking crack because I'm a cop and we hate writing at all. And it's going to be short, sweet to the point. And so, but in that moment, he really laid it on my heart. Like, and I started thinking about it and like, you know what? This story does have a lot of hope in it. And Hope is actually the name of our youngest daughter who is three and a half now. 

00:48:11 Jonathan: And so, you know, it's something that got laid on my heart. And then I started being surrounded by, it's like God was like, okay, I'm trying to tell you something. Started getting surrounded by people who either were in the process of writing a book or had already written a book. So it didn't seem so scary to me anymore. And so I just started to write. I laid out my title, my outline and started to write in one chapter at a time. I would send email to my mom and my mom and I would print them out. And she'd go through them and like, if there was a word choice or sentence structure, she felt needed to be corrected. We'd go through that with, red pen it and everything. 

00:48:52 Jonathan: And she was like, what are you doing with this? And I'm like, you know, mom, I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing with this, but it was very therapeutic, reliving my life and writing down how I felt about it, like real talk. And I just, like, I just started to realize like, wow, this stuff really did have, it really does have such a powerful hold on me and my emotions and you know, who I am today is a direct, this is why. And so as I wrote, you know, I was like, I still was like, this is garbage. No one's going to read this. My mom made me delete a whole paragraph about learning to ride a motorcycle for the first time. She’s like, this has nothing to do with anything. And I'm like, but it's a motorcycle. 

00:49:44 Erin: Right. Anything I can do to turn motorcycles in there. 

00:49:46 Jonathan: Yeah. So I'm like, fine, mom, I'll get rid of that. But yeah, as it kind of started finishing up, I started looking into publication options and I still felt like this is garbage. I'm the only one. And that's the biggest fallacy that any of us will ever believe. And from a spiritual side, it's also the best weapon the enemy has against us. You're the only one, you're the only one that's ever felt this way. You're the only one that feels like garbage right now. And garbage, while I was writing it and when I started to try to market it, cause I was all in when I started to try to market it and a lot of that revolves around not only a website, but social media, you know, joining groups, looking at the blue help website, I was not aware of all this stuff.

00:50:37 Jonathan: You know, all this police suicide, firefighter, dispatcher suicide, like I was not aware of all the post-traumatic stress stuff and all the, like, yeah, like it's starting to come together now. And so even though I had no clue why I was doing what I was doing, God had a plan and was going to use it for great things. I just had to kind of take the step of obedience and write the book.

00:51:03 Erin: And just like, okay, fine. I'll do it.

00:51:07 Jonathan: I don't know. I just started talking about doing it and people look at me like, uh-huh. Okay. Sure. You are, you know, I'm writing a book. Oh, okay. You know, and thought I was, it was just a momentary thing, but you know, you just, it was something that really was laid on my heart and now I understand why. So I did not at the time, I'll honestly tell you, I had no clue why anyone would pick up and read anything that came out of my fingertips. So yeah, it's very humbling. 

00:51:39 Erin: Somebody read it enough to think that it was worth a movie. How did that happen? 

00:51:44 Jonathan: So the movie part is an interesting story too. That's another kind of higher power Rod story too. After it had been doing really well, like I am not Oprah Winfrey. So, you know, to write a book and have it, do fairly well, and I'm not a millionaire, but it's sold thousands of copies. So like, it's still not a lot of money, but it's helped to justify its existence financially. But I would say that once it was out doing well, I started looking into the possibility of having it made into a movie. And there's websites out there that will take your money and say, we're going to take your book and we're going to advertise it to filmmakers and create a database out of your manuscript. And they're going to make a movie out of it and you're going to, you know.

00:52:35 Jonathan: And so like, I even emailed Sony Affirm Films they made, at the time I think it was just Affirm Films, but they made heaven is for real and soul surfer, a couple of the bigger faith based films, they, I even went to a comic con, bought a ticket to meet David A.R. White who was in the movie, God's Not Dead and founded Pure Flix. You ever heard of Pure Flix? It's like the Christian version of Netflix. Yeah. He's been in a lot of Christian films. So I thought maybe he would, if I gave him a copy of my book that, like, he would be like, Hey, Jonathan, let's make a movie and I'll pay all sorts of money. But that's not how it works. You know? 

00:53:19 Jonathan: So I really didn't know what else to do. And so I'm like, okay, I don't know. You know, this is my area of expertise. So we're just going to pray over it. So Stacy and I, my wife, we started to pray that, you know, if God wanted to use the story that way, that He'd make it happen cause we didn't know what else to do. And a couple months later, the guy that narrated my audio book, Erin, you listened to it. He reached out to me and he said, Hey, I'm going to be in a film and this film company, they make some faith based stuff. He's, like the connection, seemed like they are there. So over and out me a copy of your book and I'll put it in the hands of the movie company owner. 

00:54:03 Jonathan: And so that's kind of how it all started, you know, like it's just people helping people and God using His people to kind of make this take the next step. And there's so many different stories I can tell you about, like how this almost was a really cruddy B-movie. It's obviously not like a million dollar budget movie, right? But they did really well with what we had to work with as a budget. And it almost didn't happen. The guy that was supposed to originally direct my film, his only experience prior to what he was getting ready to do was he had a 32nd ivory soap commercial. And so it was a good commercial, but I mean, that's a lot different than a full length feature film. Right. 

00:54:50 Jonathan: So it's just so amazing that it turned out the way it did because, you know, yes, even with the film, there’s probably a few things that I would have, would change. Like, for example, early on in the movie when, young me is, you know, facing the loss of his father, you know, the parents look really old. My dad was 49 years old when he died and my mom was 43. They'd been married for 23 years. I'm 44 right now. So I'm thinking like at the time that I was a child, I'm like, you know, my parents are really old that they weren't, you know, my dad wasn't even 50. So here I am coming up on 49 years old myself. 

00:55:39 Jonathan: And I'm like, I can't even imagine being taken from my family right now. They need me so badly. I can't imagine leaving my wife right now because how would she do life without. I mean, she's tough. So she'd figure it out, but like, let's, please God, you know? 

00:55:55 Cinnamon: Yeah. My husband is 49 right now. So, yeah, that hits. 

00:56:01 Jonathan: So he robbed the cradle? Wow. 

00:56:03 Erin: Oh, you're so sweet. My husband robbed the cradle. My husband's 52. 

00:56:07 Cinnamon: Yes, that would be true. 

00:56:10 Erin: Which is weird. 

00:56:10 Cinnamon: Let's just say her husband could have babysat her. 

00:56:13 Erin: Yes, we joke about it. But I'm waiting for Cinnamon because she usually is like the… throwing down the questions towards the end every time. But–

00:56:23 Cinnamon: Yeah, I got some. 

00:56:24 Erin: Okay. 

00:56:25 Cinnamon: I got some. 

00:56:26 Erin: She's been really–

00:56:27 Jonathan: Come on. 

00:56:28 Erin: She usually takes a lot of notes and she's never looking at the camera. And I'm like, we both realized like, you gotta look at the camera. Even though you're–

00:56:34 Cinnamon: It looks like I'm not paying attention. 

00:56:37 Erin: But she is, she's paying attention too much. 

00:56:39 Cinnamon: That's too much. So if you hear, like shuffling on my end, it's literally because I've secretly been writing with pen and paper. 

00:56:48 Jonathan: Wow. 

00:56:48 Cinnamon: Where no one could see me. 

00:56:51 Jonathan: Awesome.

00:56:51 Cinnamon: And I have not even a full page and it's like, you know, 16 point font in my handwriting. So yeah, because we realized how many things we actually can't use for videos because it looks like, I'm like, not paying attention at all. I'm like, it's so boring when actually it's like, gotta ask. So two things that came up while you were talking and they were, we gotta go all the way back to the beginning. 

00:57:24 Jonathan: Okay.

00:57:24 Cinnamon: When you had talked about the nightmares and that you're not having them anymore, nightmares are such a frequent symptom. Whether, you know, it's probably one of the biggest symptoms I most often see even in my retirees is the nightmares. And no matter if it's police, fire, dispatch, patrol, corrections, it always comes down to the issue of preparedness. Like, something is going to catch me because, for whatever reason, I'm not prepared. And sometimes it's a… like, I've been retired for a few months and so I've shifted into rest and digest. And my body is recognizing it or it's, something happens and all of a sudden that perception of invincibility is broken and the facade of being prepared to the point that nothing bad could ever happen is broken. And so when you started talking about not having those nightmares anymore, I was going to ask you about that. 

00:58:37 Cinnamon: But then what I ended up writing down was, believes God. And the idea of what everybody else might be struggling with that maybe doesn't have that relationship of like God got my six, but do you see the difference in the frequency of the nightmares of feeling like it was all up to you and then you realize like there was a, I don't know a crack where you could see the light of, oh shit. If it's all up to me, I cannot guarantee anything. And then kind of moving over to, I have a higher power that my plan is not the plan and I get to trust that I am taken care of in the ways that I'm meant to be taken care of. 

00:59:32 Jonathan: Just listening to you say that it's just comforting me to hear that because I believe that. So thank you. Yes. So I was, one of the things that I think we skipped in the bio was that I was a crash reconstruction officer investigating fatalities for seven years. And I left involuntarily. It was a part of my discipline for, you know, I did get to keep my job. And my career has thankfully recovered many years later, took some time, took some humility, took some forgiveness of myself and others to forgive me, but it was something that, especially when I got into that role where you're working all these crashes, where people are just driving along and then some drunk a hole, you know, ends their life or their entire family's life or, you know, a child's life and maybe not even alcohol always involved, right? 

01:00:32 Jonathan: Whereas just a tragic, you know, idiotic moment on someone's part that someone loses their light and the ripple effects. You know, where children lose their parents or parents lose their children or whatever. A spouse loses their spouse, you know, seeing that and being a liaison to the family and, you know, having to go through the intricate details of a violent crash, of a fresh kill, you know, where  it's not pretty, it's not, you know, there's reasons they put blankets on over them, you know, because it's disgusting.

01:01:13 Jonathan: You know, seeing that and being involved in over 100 fatality investigations, you know, in a seven year time period, which may not seem like a lot, but it was a lot, it was enough for me. You know, so that was, made me live in a state of thinking that I had like, it's all up to me. I have to prevent everyone from dying. Everyone I see that's not wearing their seatbelt, I have to, you know, write them a ticket now because, like I'm going to save their life. I have to save their life. It's up to me to stop every car that's speeding before they kill someone. That mentality is unhealthy because it, well, number one, there's other people out here to help you, right? But even if you stop every car, you can, it's still not going to prevent every fatal crash from happening. 

01:02:04 Jonathan: You know, I'm still very much about safe vehicles for my family. I mean, I used to be way worse about the anxiety of just taking my daughter somewhere and make sure he has the $350 grid tax car seat and the car we're riding in better be NHTSA and IIHS super approved as far as safety ratings and stuff like that. So, you know, there was a lot of anxiety about that, about, and in, you know, we hear about the officer down Memorial page where all these cops are getting killed every day. There's a new email from them about a cop getting ambushed or killed on a traffic stop or, you know, whatever these, some of the crazy ways are killed. 

01:02:55 Jonathan: So all these things can contribute to, you have to cover your own six and you are the only one that can control your survival out here and help others. And that's a lot to bear. That's a lot to expect of yourself. And so when I started to give my life over to God and really start to trust and believe that, you know, He has plans for me and plans of hope and a future, to quote Jeremiah 29:11. But like when you believe that in your heart, that it's not all up to you anymore, that there is a higher power and that ultimate control is above your pay grade, it's kind of nice. You know, it's kind of nice to believe that because then you don't feel like you have to take care of everything in the world. 

01:03:50 Jonathan: And I feel that yes, you still have to be responsible and not do stupid things, like don't drink and drive, you know, that's a bad thing. Don't do that. But there's only so much you can do, you know, and so you have to trust. And are you going to, who are you going to trust? Are you going to trust that higher power? You’re going to trust God. You're going to trust whoever you believe in, or are you going to feel like there is no one that is out there to take care of us and just live in a constant state of fear. I choose to believe. 

01:04:25 Jonathan: And so that's helped me immensely. And I think that's a great topic of conversation for, as far as long-term healing, is one thing to do EMDR. It's one thing to do different therapies, group therapy, talk therapy. But long-term, the only thing that's going to help you is believing that someone else has your six and it's not you. 

01:04:50 Cinnamon: Thank you. That was a great answer. And it tapped right into what I think is so important. And ironically, I do EMDR. I do accelerated resolution therapy too. I had somebody cancel. They don't need to come back. They haven't had nightmares since last time they saw me. 

01:05:11 Jonathan: Excellent. 

01:05:11 Cinnamon: And like, I'm super excited for that. And at the same time, there's so much more available than just the resolution of that one nightmare. And our practice is called, whole house because of a quote by Rumer Godden, but one of the rooms that makes up the whole house is the spiritual component. And I've just learned both in working with my clients as well as my own recovery from a plethora of things is that when I remember that I'm just part of something much bigger than me, the anxiety and the worry and the fear of something going wrong and that perpetual need to control things, it all just dissipates. And I don't, man, how many times have I said like, right or wrong is above my pay grade, right? 

01:06:12 Jonathan: That’s right, yeah.

01:06:12 Cinnamon: Left, right, right, wrong, you know, true, not true. It's, that's not what I'm, that's not what I'm here for, or what was supposed to happen versus what happened. And it comes down to my personal belief in something greater than myself. And that has, rather than just getting rid of one nightmare or one set of intrusive images from any particular event, it's that, oh wait, this is applicable to any situation. And my God doesn't have to look like your God, my higher power doesn't have to look like your higher power. It's just that idea that, ooh, thank goodness I'm not in charge of everything because I would do a shitty job. 

01:07:04 Erin: We did do a real bad job. We did a real bad job. 

01:07:06 Erin: For a long time, there's evidence. Luckily it was back in the 90s and early 2000s, not a lot of social media, not a lot of photos. 

01:07:13 Erin: Yeah. But great. 

01:07:14 Jonathan: Thank goodness. 

01:07:14 Cinnamon: Oh, these kids these days. 

01:07:15 Erin: Oh yeah. 

01:07:16 Jonathan: My speak. 

01:07:16 Erin: Oh my gosh. I love it.

01:07:18 Cinnamon: I just almost had a wet microphone there. Yes. There was one more question, and that I did want to ask because I think it, we do have a lot of wives and spouses in general that listen. And I'm sure that we are not the first time that you've talked about this journey that your family went on. And maybe you've cultivated a very particular language. But when you were talking about the loss of your first son, you said, I associated that with my wife. If I stole the word associated from you and had to put more like a feeling word or something less neutral in there. 

01:08:08 Erin: What? 

01:08:08 Jonathan: Sure.

01:08:08 Cinnamon: And the real, like I've had clients in this situation. And again, this is, you know, at the end of the day, regardless of, and if nobody else is listening, I know that our clients do. And so I want to take away any kind of interpretation and see if you would be willing to like, in your mind, what does associate mean? 

01:08:31 Jonathan: Okay. When I would look at my wife, I would think about the, like I would think about the death and I would think about that, of the body of a small infant, you know? And I would think of certain details of like, anatomy, you know, like thinking about my wife and the desire physically, right. For her. And now it's like this interrupt of no, like there's something broken and bad that happened and it's not right. And so now I'm looking at my wife and I'm supposed to be looking at her from a healthy place of love and desire and open relationship and with each other. And instead I can't tell her what I'm feeling and I can't tell her these horrible thoughts that are going through my mind that she would never want to hear because it would just devastate her. 

01:09:32 Jonathan: So instead I have nothing to say. And now I can't even look her in the eye anymore. And now I don't want to be even around her. Now I can barely talk about life, details of life. You know, like who's going to pick up the kid or whatever, you know? So when those things started to happen, it's like now a very fragile, already damaged relationship from years of me abusing alcohol, being angry, cynical and bitter as most first responders are outside of the duty role. I mean, even at work, they're bitter and cynical, but at home it gets magnified. You know, I've talked about the Facebook highlight reel, you know, like the reality is that first responders, a lot of us deal with anger issues and outbursts and irritability and all these symptoms of post-traumatic stress. That’s for the whole career layered on top of each other, not resolved. 

01:10:41 Jonathan: And it's a daily battle. Even with healing, even, you know, because you're right back in the fight. It's not like a deployment that a soldier goes through for six months. And I'm not minimizing what a soldier goes through at all, but at least that goes a year or six months a year deployment, they get to come back and not go back for a while. Right. So instead we have maybe a day off here or there with training court, you know, emails from the captain chief. You know, Sergeant, whatever your current role is, it never goes away. And for 25 years, 30 years, 27 years, 22 years, whatever your career length is, it's no escape from it. And so that's again, so it's so important to face things in healthy ways. 

01:11:29 Jonathan: And if you're facing something extremely traumatic, you have to go talk to someone about it when, if you're starting, if it's starting to affect your behavior and your relationships. And the problem is that cops, firefighters, first responders are, you know, they believe they buy into this stoic mentality, we are cuff, we are fixers of everything in one hour. We will fix every problem you have - a crash, a death, whatever, you know? And so they believe they had to fix themselves too. And that's like the worst thing in the world because we totally suck at that. And so for me, it was just this, taking this fragile relationship, taking the new thoughts I was having. And now I'm like, I just get to get away and there's nothing, you know, there's no hope for this. 

01:12:28 Jonathan: I remember going to a few friends about those feelings, trusted friends who I thought the world of, who I respected. One friend I said, like, I am having trouble with like, you know, to be honest, like sexual desire right now, like, I don't know how to fix that. And his advice was like, Oh, just go like, you know, tear it up. You know, like that's not helpful at all. Like, you know, I'm like, I was already having a hard time even talking about it to begin with. And now I'm ashamed. I wish I'd never said anything. 

01:13:02 Jonathan: Another good friend of mine that I'd known for years. I said, I don't know what's going on with our marriage right now. I said, I wonder if I… I think I married the wrong person. You know, it sounds like a great excuse. And he's like, oh, that sucks, man. I'm like, no, don't say that. That's wrong. I'm like, yeah, good. Yeah. Here, have another beer. So, you know, you have to, if you're going to talk through your problems with someone, you better make sure it's the right people and not some… 

01:13:37 Jonathan: You know, no disrespect to these two people that I was talking to, but you know, they're not qualified to speak about those kinds of things with any level of knowledge, expertise, or any level of health. So it, you know, that's what happens when you Google WebMD, whatever you're, is going on with you, you know, like you can't self-diagnose these things. 

01:13:58 Erin: Well, and there's a chance that they're going through their own things too, which makes it even harder to connect in that empathetic way. 

01:14:05 Cinnamon: They got a filter.

01:14:07 Jonathan: That's a great point. Especially cops. That brings up another great point is that cops suck to talk to, I mean, peer support is different, right? That's a select group of, select few that maybe are more empathetic than most, but if I had somebody that I really wanted to talk to about how I was feeling, like, am I really going to go to a cop that's like, yeah, I already hear all this crap from everybody else. Like get to the point. I don't want to hear it anyway. You know, you should probably go, you know, they, like they don't, they have so much of that in their career already, that I don't know that they are programmed in that way, that they're going to give you a lot of empathy. And so I don't know that other police officers, other firefighters are always the same, the best people to talk to about our stuff we're struggling with. 

01:14:59 Cinnamon: I think there's, just what you said. There is a dominant, what I like to call, like solution fatigue. And this even happens for me and my role, which is a little bit different. At the end of the day, don't ask me to solve your problem. Don't ask me to make a decision about dinner. Don't ask me where I want this piece of furniture moved. I am done. And that's why I am a lover of quitting. I quit at the end of the day, every day. Now I'll start back up, but there has to be a point for me. 

01:15:38 Cinnamon: And the other thing that I've learned, I think that's paramount and what you said was, you have to find somebody who has been through it and got out the other side because the empathy is completely different. When you're talking to someone who hasn't had their own, you call it, you know, break, I call it bend, a bend through that they're not going to, it's going to go right over their heads.

01:16:07 Cinnamon: So that's what we see with the peer support. Most of them have had their own experience. So they're the people that are going to be able to say, I don't know exactly how you feel, but I've been somewhere similar. And even if I don't have any advice for you, let me tell you how I navigated it. And I think that's just so much different than a lot of people will say, we'll talk to a trusted friend. Well, a lot of people can be trusted friends, but still not the right people.

01:16:37 Cinnamon: And so even if it's not necessarily peer support that you're that familiar with, luckily they have the training. And that's why I love what you're doing. You have to talk out loud. You have to be out in the forefront saying, I've been through it. This was my process. This is what it looked like. This is how I got to the other side. Because if it's not the people who have actually endured it that are talking about it, it sure isn't going to be the people who haven't because they don't have a point of reference yet. 

01:17:09 Cinnamon: So I love that you are talking. I love that you're training in academies and 40 hour in services and you've got a movie and a book because that is we have to have the people who have had these experiences and these revelations and epiphanies, even though it can be embarrassing and hard. If it's not you, then who? 

01:17:36 Jonathan: No, you're exactly right. You don't want to read the book about how to restore a classic automobile from someone who doesn't know how to do it, you know, that their whole, that, you know, they're just like, well, this sounds like this would be a good idea. So I'm just going to write a book about it. And I'm the expert now. You have to go to someone that's going to be able to help you. And so the only thing that qualifies someone as an expert is someone that's been through it. Like you said, in this circumstance, you know, if you wanted to, you know, if you had to have a surgery on your brain, you don't want somebody that's a foot doctor, you know, or you don't want somebody that's a mechanic, you know, to do it, you want someone that knows what they're doing. 

01:18:22 Jonathan: And so, you know, while I'm not an expert on everything, I know what it's like to go. In my mind to hell and back on earth. And my hope is that, you know, I'll give some hope to somebody else. And I know that, you know, that my story has helped a lot of people. And, you know, if it just saved one life, that would be enough, but it's helping a lot of people. And so that is like, to me, it's very humbling because I don't think of myself as any different than anybody else. I'm just having the courage to talk about my story and not because people should feel sorry for me, but because people should realize that if they're struggling now that there's hope. 

01:19:08 Jonathan: Or if they, you know, are facing something that they feel like there is no coming back from that, you know, there's always tomorrow, that there's always light, that there's always hope for tomorrow, but you just have to see it and you have to believe it. And it's not easy. It's incredibly difficult to have the courage to do things about it, to get help, to go to therapy, like that's work. And especially talk therapy. Now you got to talk about the stuff that you don't want to talk about. That's horrible. I hated that. But I never would have, real… I never realized it would be so helpful. 

01:19:54 Jonathan: You know, one of the biggest, most powerful scenes in my opinion, in the film and in the book is when the empty chair exercise and in the movie we get to see it put into, like this scene makes me so emotional because it's like the counselor wants me to talk to my dad who's sitting in this empty chair. Pretend that your dad, your father who passed away when you were 12 is sitting in this empty chair in front of you and I want you to say everything that you said to him. And in real life, this is very real. That scene is so true to life. As far as, in the film, you know, I was like, hell, no. Like this is stupid, like, I'm going to talk to an empty chair and that's going to fix me. Like I had a little attitude correction, and took it seriously. 

01:20:45 Jonathan: And as soon as I started believing my dad was sitting in that empty chair, I broke and the tears would not stop. And I'm telling them all these things that I wanted to tell them that, you know, I love you and, you know, wish you saw me become a police officer and meet your granddaughter and now grandchildren. Right. And just all that brokenness, all that, I'm like, I didn't care anymore. I just had to get it out. And it was so like, it's so powerful in the film, how he kind of gets to step back into his childhood and see his dad again. You know, that's what, that's kind of what the way I felt that I really was talking to him. And so, you know, it was hard to do that. It was hard to be, to take that seriously for a moment and to actually go through this exercise that I thought was garbage, waste of time, stupid. I'm too good for that.

01:21:42 Jonathan: But it was the most, one of the most healing parts of the whole thing for me was to be able to just kind of let some of that go. I had a lot of guilt from, I don't know where, I thought I was a good, not a good enough son, you know, like I felt guilty about lying to my dad about stupid things, you know, carrying that with you every day is… eats at you. And so it was incredibly therapeutic. It was incredibly helpful. And if I hadn't listened to what that expert counselor was telling me to do, then I would have really missed out on the benefits of that. 

01:22:18 Erin: Wow. Thank you for sharing that. And I know that, Cinnamon actually pointed that exercise out, excuse me, when we were watching the movie, the empty chair exercise, like that was something that she actually brought up while we were watching the movie. And thank you for sharing that so people can hear that. Like it might sound stupid. You might wonder why this person is telling you to do this, but trust that there's a reason. And that's the key, is the trust. And you guys have been taught, you have just learned that you cannot trust people. And so for us to say, please just trust us for a second to invite you to come and talk to this empty chair or all the other things that we do on purpose. 

01:22:58 Jonathan: Do you guys do that? The empty chair, do you use that? 

01:23:01 Cinnamon: So it's a gestalt method. And yes, there's definitely opportunities that we use it. And actually I can tell you that I had a therapist a long time ago before I got Sober, who would ask me to do that and talk to the empty chair, having my still living father in it, and I couldn't do it. I was terrified to say the things that I needed to say, even though, you know, it was, there was no way he was ever gonna know what I said. It was just all this psychological block of like, you can't say that to your dad. So I get how powerful that empty chair is, whether it's, to be afraid to say those things or to have said those things and feel like you've released them. So yeah, we, there are times and with people in certain situations where we do the big empty chair. 

01:24:07 Jonathan: Cool. Yeah. Well, anybody listening, if you get that opportunity, if they, if your counselor tells you to do that, you listen.

01:24:13 Erin: We also ask our clients to do a lot of things that they think are weird, but then they get it after they try. So hey. 

01:24:19 Cinnamon: Yeah. And many of our clients are oftentimes just desperate enough to say, that sounds like absolute lunacy, but–

01:24:27 Erin: Okay.

01:24:28 Cinnamon: I don't have anything left to lose. 

01:24:29 Erin: Right.

01:24:30 Cinnamon: We'll do it. 

01:24:32 Jonathan: Yeah. 

01:24:32 Erin: Jonathan Hickory. Author Jonathan Hickory. I know, is that word. Okay. Officer Jonathan, which is how we found you. 

01:24:42 Cinnamon: Now we're like Sergeant Jonathan. 

01:24:44 Erin: Yeah. 

01:24:44 Jonathan: That’s right.

01:24:44 Erin: Sergeant Jonathan, we really appreciate your time. 

01:24:49 Jonathan: Yes, thank you ladies. 

01:24:50 Erin: The work that you're doing, being committed to making up this interview, even though it's been months and months and months since we last talked. When I texted you last night and you're like, thanks for the reminder. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad I messaged him. 

01:25:01 Jonathan: Oh no, I had it. I knew it was coming. I wasn't like, I had talked to my wife about it. I'm like, we had it on our Google calendar and everything. I definitely was not–

01:25:09 Cinnamon: We need that Google.

01:25:11 Jonathan: That's right. I was not going to be, I was not going to forget, but I did appreciate the fact that you took time to reach out to me. So, thank you. 

01:25:18 Erin: My pleasure. 

01:25:19 Jonathan: And thank you guys for what you're doing with this podcast and for what you do every day, so important. And you're helping change and save lives. So that is, there is no better work that can be done. 

01:25:31 Cinnamon: Thank you. 

01:25:32 Erin: Thank you. We're a team. So break every chain by the way, listener. I have already added it months ago onto our Resources page on After The Tones Drop. Just one click away and you too can be reading this book. If you don't have Amazon Prime, which I'm like, who doesn't have Prime, but I'm sure lots of people don't. You can also watch the movie on YouTube, but just get extra popcorn because you'll be sitting through commercials, but that's okay, too. Or through ads.

01:26:01 Erin: But I strongly encourage you to get a peek behind someone else's curtain in that vulnerable way by either listening or reading the book or watching the movie because it's very impactful and we know it's touching our clients' lives and touched our lives and yeah, you're touching lives, man. So thank you so much for your time. 

01:26:24 Jonathan: I'm so thankful for that. And the movie's also on Tubi and Pluto TV, Fandango at Home, there's lots of different, just Google it, you'll find it. Break every chain. Well, I appreciate all of your time as well.

01:26:44 Erin: Thank you for joining us for today's episode of After the Tones Drop. Today's show has been brought to you by Whole House Counseling. As a note, After the Tones Drop is for informational purposes only and does not constitute for medical or psychological advice. It is not a substitute for professional healthcare advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please contact a local mental health professional in your area if you are in need of any assistance. You can also visit AfterTheTonesDrop.com and click on our Resources tab for an abundance of helpful information. And we would like to give a very special thank you and shout out to Vens Adams, Yeti, and Sanda for our show's music.