Someone can look as though they’re coping while carrying pain other people don’t see.

For Suicide Awareness Month, I’ve brought together moments from seven previous episodes of The Lonely Chapter about struggling privately, feeling heard, and what helped people through.

Dr Susie Bennett begins by exploring the pressure some men feel to appear fine. Brandon Day shares the gap between outward success and private distress. Martin Seager and Lisa Sugarman consider what it means to listen well. Jason Kubiak recalls practical support during divorce and homelessness, while Liz McConaghy reflects on losing the identity and belonging military life had given her. We return to Susie to consider immediate safety and longer-term support.

This compilation moves from hidden pain to the relationships, conversations and practical help that mattered in people’s lives. I hope it helps you understand yourself, or someone you know and love, a little better.

Content note: This episode discusses suicide, suicidal thoughts and mental health struggles. Please take care of yourself as you listen.

SUPPORT

If anything here feels familiar, support is available. In the UK, you can call Samaritans free, day or night, on 116 123.

Samaritans support information:

https://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help/contact-samaritan/

ORIGINAL EPISODES

Find these titles in The Lonely Chapter’s back catalogue, listed in the order their extracts appear:

1. Why Men Hide Their Pain Until They Break | Dr Susie Bennett | #107
2. When High Performance Leads to Burnout | Brandon Day | #105
3. Why Men Struggle in Silence | Martin Seager on Men’s Mental Health
4. How to Start Difficult Mental Health Conversations That Really Help - Lisa Sugarman
5. Why Strong Men Don’t Always Ask for Help | Jason Kubiak | #110
6. Why Peace Was Harder to Survive Than War | Liz McConaghy | #111
7. The Hidden Epidemic of Male Suicide | Dr. Susie Bennett

Follow The Lonely Chapter for more conversations about the chapters that change us.

September marks Suicide Awareness Month, and I thought it would be worthwhile revisiting some of the most poignant conversations we've had on this topic.

From the archives of the Lonely Chapter, I've brought together moments about struggling privately, people feeling heard, and what actually helped people get through to the other side.

We'll be discussing suicide and mental health struggles in this episode, so please take care of yourself as you listen.

We begin the episode with Dr. Susie Bennett.

Why do you think so many men seem completely fine up until the point that they break?

I mean, I think so many different factors come into it, and that is that, you know, the suicide deaths kind of happen across the spectrum of people where there's been known as.

In people know about it, known mental health challenges for sometimes decades and decades and other times where suicide happens completely out the blue, as you're describing now.

I think that we.

One of the findings that comes up in the research we've done is a lot of men feeling.

We sort of label it this kind of performance of self, of feeling that the expectations on them as men in the world is to be somebody that's coping, got things under control, you know, is dealing with whatever pressures and challenges they might be under, and therefore doesn't feel the sort of safety, I suppose, to be able to disclose the reality of whatever he may be feeling.

And I think that that's really dangerous.

As described by men in two ways.

The first of all is absolutely exhausting pretending, if you've ever lived your life trying to conceal something really critical about yourself from other people.

It's really, really draining of your resources.

So first of all, it's depleting.

And then the second thing that men tell us is just how incredibly lonely it is as that gulf kind of opens up between what you're presenting to the outside world and what you're feeling on the inside.

And then, you know, the real danger becomes that the.

In that isolation, the only person that you're talking to about suicide is yourself.

And that, of course, then becomes very, very dangerous.

And also the energetic kind of drain of performing is also dangerous from the point of view.

It takes energy to regulate your emotions, to regulate your pain.

And if that's being taxed by this sort of performance of self that you're feeling that you need to take on, then you're depleting the resources that you need as well to kind of cope with the challenges that are happening.

So I think it's, you know, really complicated.

And.

And the thing is, Sam, the men live in such diverse worlds so for.

There's some men in certain places where that performance of self is the.

The people around him would want.

Would want so much to know the reality of what he's feeling.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And, you know, and it may be that those feelings that he has about how he needs to be in the world are out of sync with what actually those around him kind of expect.

And then there's other parts of the world where, of course, those may be very real.

There may be real pressures around needing to feel like there's no space for you to reveal what's going on for you.

And I think as well, that something that comes through in the work as well for certain men is a challenge around understanding themselves as recipients of care.

So they.

Their understanding of themselves is, I'm the person that takes care of the people around me.

And so being able to occupy a space where you actually go, actually, no, I'm.

You know, I'm struggling in this moment can be really, really difficult.

But the point I'm trying to make is this huge diversity in men's behaviors and what might be driving it.

Brandon, you achieved a lot of what young athletes dream of.

National championships, captaining the team, and even a Sports Illustrated cover.

But underneath that, you found yourself in chronic pain and some pretty dark places.

At what point did the life that looked successful on the outside stop feeling sustainable on the inside?

Oh, Sam, great question.

I mean, there was one point where it was very clear that it was no longer sustainable.

Unfortunately, that was a very dark point and surely, like a rock bottom.

I just remember, you know, waking up one day, living in this little, kind of like, shoebox little condo with my cousin in.

In Los Angeles.

And I was on a mattress, an air mattress that deflated every night, and, like, a hole in there somewhere, I couldn't find it.

So I'd wake up every morning on the hard floor with this deflated air mattress on top of me.

And I remember waking up one morning and.

Just.

I was.

I was hungover from partying.

I was depressed.

I was in pain, like, you mentioned, physical pain, along with, like, all of this mental anguish that I had been dealing with after.

After a few years of just being lost in life and not knowing what to do next and all these expectations that I had put on myself.

And.

And I just remember that I couldn't.

I was so angry at myself because I couldn't afford a pack of cigarettes, and all I wanted to do was just smoke cigarettes and, like, just say goodbye to the world, right?

Like, I just wanted to crawl in My hole and smoke my cigarettes.

I just remember thinking, like, dude, what is happening?

Um, and it was in that moment that I also, like, you know, my mental health was really bad, and I. I didn't really see a way out except for.

And then that's when I had, like, the idea of taking.

Taking matters into my own hands and making my own exit.

Yeah.

And that was the moment where I was like, okay.

There was, like, some kind of switch flipped in my brain that was like, okay, we've officially gone on too, too long in this.

Yeah.

And we have to change something.

We'll get onto that in a moment.

What was the support around you like in that time?

Like, did you have people around you when you're in that spot?

Yeah.

I mean, that's a big reason why I'm still here today.

I didn't have them.

It would be.

It could have ended very differently.

You know, I will give myself some.

Some grace there.

And, you know, I made that decision, but I don't know if I would have been able to really pull myself out of that hole unless I had people around me.

I mean, like I said, I was living with my cousin, and he was a huge.

He's always been a huge supporter of me and one of my best friends, and I had a couple other friends around me down there that were invaluable, you know, people to talk to.

And I had.

My dad and my brother literally came into town, you know, like, a week later and just, like, picked me up, physically picked me up, put me in the car, and drove me to Arizona, where I've been for the past, you know, going on 15 years.

So.

Even without the close proximity, I knew that, you know, which is weird.

Like, when you're in that state, there's, like, these blinders and this dark cloud around you that you can't even see.

All of these people that are around and supporting you, and you're so lost in your own mind that you're blind to it.

And you think that there's nothing, and you think that everyone else that actually is supporting you and wants to help you would be better off without you.

It's the weirdest, like, mind f. Right.

That, like, switches this thing in your brain where you actually think that.

Can you talk us through a bit what you did there and how that worked?

Yeah, absolutely.

That's more than 10 years ago, which is frightening.

But I did that with someone called Michael Walton.

The two of us set up this project, which was basically a Year long intervention, trying to.

Because 80% of Samaritan's volunteers are women, just as 80% of counselors are women, 80% are psychologists.

There seems to be an 80% rule when it comes to talking or listening kind of helping approaches.

So we thought we would do an exposure of all the volunteers, including the men as well, of course, to what men's lives were like.

And at the beginning of the project, we measured how long the phone calls lasted.

So we had a sample of about a thousand phone calls and we found a certain percentage were under five minutes.

Many more phone calls with men were under five minutes than with women.

So men were more likely to have a short phone call and just hang up sort of thing.

So then we spent a year just exposing all the volunteers to men's lives.

Not directly by lecturing, but we got in a blues guitarist and he came and played some blues music for all the volunteers.

And we said, what are those lyrics about?

What are men doing there?

You know, most blues music, if you listen to it, is about men suffering.

You know, my woman left me and all this misery.

We think men don't express their feelings and it's there every day in our art.

So we did that.

We played blues music.

We got the Royal Shakespeare Company came in and all the women agreed to play the men's parts and tell us what that felt like.

And I said, gosh, they were doing Julius Caesar, of course, being the London Samaritans, we had some really nice people who were like the Royal Shakespeare Company and prepared to help.

So that was a lovely thing.

But they came in and said, yeah, these Romans, politicians, the pressure on them, they felt they had people's lives, they were responsible for all these lives.

And they felt suicidal about getting it wrong.

They suddenly realized that even these powerful men, they wouldn't have an easy life.

They really had a massive struggle with who's gonna kill them.

They didn't feel safe, they were under threat.

They were trying to protect their people.

And they.

So we all had a kind of debate about what that play, what the gender meant in Roman times.

And we did various other things.

A cellist came along and played some music and then said, what did that feel like as a male cellist playing that?

So we tried to just open up the minds of the female, mainly volunteers and men as well, to what it was like to be a man.

And then after a year of doing that, we measured the phone calls again.

And suddenly all these calls that were less than five minutes, there were very much less calls.

The men were speaking for longer and there were much fewer.

We halved the number of calls that were less than five minutes for men.

So even without telling the women or the men volunteers how to listen by just changing their minds, exposing them, what had changed?

We hadn't changed the callers because they didn't know we'd been doing this.

What we'd changed is the way we were listening.

So what that proves is if you change the way you listen to men, they will talk better.

It's nothing to do with the men.

You listen better to men and they will talk.

So it's not about, come on guys, open up.

The message should be, come on society, let's listen to men better.

Yeah, and that's the thing at the minute is men need to talk more.

Men should be talking, let's help men talk.

But we're not actually giving them the space or opening our minds to, as a society, potentially to how we make that happen and how we start to listen to men better.

So by just like, like you did there, getting people to understand the experience more, not lecturing about, okay, when they say this, you might say this in return, that's not going to change it, but just a deeper understanding and the effect that that had, that's really, really interesting.

You mentioned about your work as a crisis counsellor as well.

So what are some of the most powerful lessons that you've learned from doing that work?

I think I've honed the art, honed it in terms of where I was with it before I was on the crisis lifelines to where I am now.

I think I've honed my own ability to effectively hold space for people.

I don't know about you and I don't know about anyone else who's listening, but for me, whenever I would hold space, and if someone isn't familiar with the term, it just means listening.

Different way of saying listening.

If I'm holding space for someone, the inclination, if they say something has happened, if they're upset about a situation, we all want to inject that, oh, that happened to me.

I get it, I understand, I went through it.

I know what that feels like.

Or you give, you want to give an anecdote, something to maybe help the person feel more connected to you.

That's the natural inclination, or at least it was always mine.

And what I've learned is that that actually takes the conversation away from the person you're holding space from.

Even if you're well intentioned, even if it's designed to give that person perspective, that helps Things get easier, feel easier.

We're taking that conversation away from that person, and now all of a sudden, it's on us.

So what I've been trained and through my experience with Trevor Project, and I'm also a licensed 988 crisis counselor here in the US as well.

It's really all about maintaining agency, maintaining that person's agency that you're trying to help.

In the context of this conversation, we're talking about people who call a lifeline, but in the context of anybody who might be listening to our conversation, we're talking about the conversations you have with people who come to you, who are upset or grieving or lost or scared.

And what I've learned is really and truly just to let that person drive the conversation in whatever way they possibly need to drive that conversation.

Like they should not be distracted by anything that we have to offer.

We need to hold space.

Just whatever it is that person is sharing, we need to take it at face value.

Even if it sounds outlandish, even if it's something that wouldn't faze us in the least bit, we have to acknowledge that that is the thing that is most overwhelming for them right now and that everybody's different.

And that's, that's one of the things that, that I've learned over these last several years that's not just helped me on lifelines, but it's.

It's helped me with my children, it's helped me with my husband and my family and my friends.

I listen in a different way now and, and I really do talk a lot less and listen a lot more.

We'd had some particular bad incidents at work.

One of the things I would say is working in a station when you grew up, there's a chances that you will come across things or people in incidents that you may have known or set first or second, third party to friend groups and stuff.

So I experienced a little bit of that, which was difficult.

And it was just.

It all come together really in that moment.

And I just started breaking down.

I had a.

During that part, the period of the divorce, I was back at my mom and dad's, my grown man.

And, you know, having to go back to your parents is quite difficult financially, really struggling and it was just a really difficult period of time.

It was all building up into one.

And that's where it all kind of.

It started to really snowball from them.

Really had a huge argument with my family, and then essentially I ended up pretty much Homeless.

So I was sofa surfing for a fair bit at a time, ended up staying in tents, borrowing someone's camper van, staying in campervan.

I was in a shed with a friend of mine.

I stayed in a shed for a while and yeah, it was just homeless.

Not seeing my family, not looking after myself, not looking after my children, you know, all the things that we should be doing or I felt I should be doing as a man, providing for all them people.

And then it got really bad to the point where I was pretty much self medicating myself really to get through every day that would sleep most of the day and I would do anything to do that to be able to sleep.

And it was a really odd chain of events.

A guy called Terry Ridgeley who was an ADO in Buckhamshire Foreign Rescue Service and he'd retired but he was kind of like, I'd say he was my link officer.

So he's head of our benevolent fund.

Right.

And he was in incredibly incredible.

And I don't even know whether he's still on this planet.

I think he may have passed away.

Bless, bless him.

But he kept reaching out week after week, week after week.

He's like, right, okay, let's see what we can do.

So he took me to a financial advisor to start with because I wasn't living and I was surviving essentially.

And I'd gone to a financial advisor like, right, okay, look, pay your priority debts, pay the mortgage, pay council tax, these kind of things, anything else, credit cards, debts, all that sort of stuff.

Just tell the companies that you can't afford, you can't afford to pay it.

So that.

Because essentially we needed to find, I needed to have somewhere to live.

Yeah.

So we did that and I was staying at that time, at a moment in time, I'm sleeping on a sofa in a tattoo studio where I was doing a little bit of work.

And I remember pulling up in a car park, sorry mate, to and I just was kind of lost, had nowhere to, to go or didn't know what to do.

And I just looked across and there was a family law solicitors on the other side of the car park.

And so I got out the car, just knocked on the door, just wanted some help.

So ladies answered the door.

She's like, I'm just in tears, just unconsolable.

Sit down.

Typical cup of tea, sugar biscuit.

So just talking to me like nobody had done through that period of that, that time actually trying to find out what was going on.

Are you okay?

I'm like, no, I'm not seeing my children.

I see that you do like a free sort of 30 minute consultation.

And so she, she spoke for hours, it felt like hours.

And, and in a really bizarre turn of events, she was said, when I say a bizarre turn of events, as we're going through naturally, organically, she says, what do you do for a living, Jason?

I was on a firefighter.

She's like, oh, I had a, we had a fire at my home in Parsnam and you guys saved my horses from the stables, et cetera.

And I was like, jesus, I was at that incident.

And she goes, well, I've been meaning to give thanks to Buckinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service.

You're here for a reason today, so I'm going to represent you for free with your family law stuff.

So she offered to represent me for free from that day forward.

And that was, yeah, just like, mind boggling to me there and then.

So that was a, that was a slight relief, but it didn't take everything away.

I was still in a really bad position.

I had a really bad moment where I, I didn't really want to be here.

Um, I say it was it.

Was it an attempt of my own life?

Probably not.

Was it misadvent, misadventure more lightly?

But I, I took too much of something and, and eventually almost put myself into respiratory arrest and I was found and that was a real wake up call for me.

Then after that, in that period, then the fire brigade, obviously, they started getting involved, supporting me a little bit with, with, with counseling, et cetera.

And then they were like, we need you to go to the doctor.

So, doctor, first thing the doctors says is, we're gonna, we're gonna medicate you.

You need to start taking some medication.

And that, that, that chain of events there was like, wow.

And I'm reading this, I can remember reading the medications for telepram.

I think it was, take however many tablets a day.

Then I start looking at the, the kind of like the side effects and stuff and how long it will take to be in your system.

And I think in.

That was a wake up call was so profound that I was like, well, hold on a minute.

Why am I feeling that the way I'm feeling?

You know, I'm pretty much homeless.

I'm not seeing my children.

And no doing other than any, Anybody, no, nobody is doing other than myself.

And that kind of really gave me the driving force to start sorting things out.

That and the help of Terry Richley.

He was, he was incredibly, absolutely incredible.

So he was like, jace we need to find you, we need to find a place to live.

And at that moment in time I still had, I was skydiving.

So I had had a little tribe of people around me work, I was non existent, all the guys that I worked with, the watch just left me to my own devices pretty much essentially that's how it felt from my memory that I can remember.

But I had a really good tribe of people around me.

Long story short, found a place to live on the airfield.

They had these old pig sheds that they converted into like little bed sits and one popped up to rent.

And that's how I met my current wife actually.

And it was, it was, I think it was about 900 pound deposit had to put down and I didn't have that.

So I phoned Terry, I said, Terry, look, I found a found place to live but I haven't got the deposit for it.

He's like, Joe stopped my, I'll sort that out.

I don't know where that money come from.

But he turned up the following day with £900.

He put £900 deposit down and then that was it.

I wasn't homeless.

I had a, I had a bed sit.

Essentially nothing in it, but I had a bed sit shelter.

So I started getting better, I started to feel better, was doing the right things, went back to work, but went to work too early.

Still wasn't well enough to see my children on the level that I wanted to or should do again, my doing, nobody else's.

And then I went into work one day on what was an empty bed sit.

I come back to and it had been fully kitted out my powers at the airfield.

So yeah, I've walked through the door what went to, from an empty little bed sit room to having a sofa, a tv, cutlery, condiments, a, a bed, a mattress, duvet, covers everything.

It was just, that was, that was it.

And then slowly I started to pull, everything started to come back into place.

I never, for me, I didn't end up medicating myself, I didn't opt on that route, but it was, yeah, it was, it was very challenging and I think I made it more difficult myself because not seeking for that help or that early intervention from the, from the get go or saying I needed something, I did mma.

As you know, I was a professional fighter for a short period of time.

And mentally I'm like, yeah, I can, you know, I've got this, I just bite down and I'll swing for the fences.

It was like, keep swinging and I'm Going to come out the other side.

But it's completely different.

That mental fortitude for that kind of battle to the battle I was going through, where I didn't have control is where I really let myself down.

And I'd like to think the lessons that I've learned from that maze has made me a tremendously better person and how I recognize that in other people as well, you know, now.

So I can.

I can support people better, I think.

And obviously, every day.

Every day has its challenges, and it is still.

It still lingers there for me.

And I have my quiet days and I need my solitude.

I need to be on my own sometimes.

I need people around me sometimes.

I think that's part of what's not discussed a lot in a fire service is, you know, that tribe, having that group of people around you constantly, when that's taken away.

That's one of the big things that I'm concerned about when I come to retire.

Yeah.

Because essentially now I've got all of these.

My watch, all of these people, yourself, everyone that you're wrapped around.

And when you go away, it doesn't take long to get forgotten.

So that next chapters is something which is coming pretty quick.

Yeah.

But that was pretty much kind of my story.

Yeah.

Very, very difficult.

Yeah.

Thank you for telling it.

No, you're welcome.

Thank you for listening.

What was it like, that moment when you walked?

You spoke about the importance of the.

Tribe and stuff like that.

When you walked back through the doors.

Of your bedsit after that day at work and you saw it kitted out.

Knowing that they'd done that for you.

Oh.

You couldn't even describe the emotions that.

The closest that would have ever come anywhere remotely to us when the.

The birth of my daughter.

That's how down I was to be surviving in a lifestyle where you should be living or have the ability to live, to get back and think that you've got nothing to give.

But then there's some people out there that have done that for you.

Just.

It completely blew my mind.

Yeah.

Completely blew my mind.

Liz, you survived Iraq, Afghanistan, and years of flying into danger.

But from what I understand, the chapter that nearly took your life came after you left the raf.

When did you first realize that peace might be harder to survive than war?

That is a brilliant opening question.

We write for a side hunch there.

It was the loneliness, I think.

I think.

Which is a very ironic considering the title of your podcast.

You know, I thrived that whole time in Afghanistan, time in Iraq.

It was people.

It was purpose.

It was teamwork.

And then suddenly when you're out of the forces and during COVID which is when I started to fall apart, it was the loneliness, the time of my own, that really started to unhinge me.

You know, we thrive on purpose, we thrive on making a difference to people.

And suddenly when you can't do that, especially in your line of work, suddenly when you can't do that and you're all on your own, that's what started to unravel me very, very quickly.

So were there times of loneliness whilst you were serving at all?

Or was it that whilst you were serving you always had someone around you, it was always go, go, go, and you never got a moment to just sit with what was going on inside?

Yeah, very much so.

You know, I think most people probably wish for a bit of time on their own whenever they're away deployed, but you're living in combined accommodation, you, you know, tents that there's, you know, 10 to 12 of you living in the same tent.

Even the accommodation blocks, there's usually a two day room.

So very rarely do you get those small moments just to sort of reflect on what's gone through the day.

And one of our jobs out in Afghanistan was that medical emergency response team, which is the airborne ambulance.

So we saw some really traumatic stuff and we decompressed together as a crew and we debrief, but we never really had that much time to go and reflect.

And also in the thick of Afghanistan, you were straight into the next one, you were straight into the next shout or the next deliberate operation or whatever.

So you just didn't have the time to process things.

And the reality is that's probably a good thing at the time because if you had to have that time to sit and wallow in your thoughts, it might have started to unravel you like it did for me many, many years later.

So that kind of rapid pace is what kept a lot of us going.

I think you mentioned about obviously being medically discharged and leaving the raf.

Obviously you can reflect on it from your perspective now.

But what was it like for you.

In that moment, losing that?

I think I was holding on quite tight for quite a long time.

You know, my neck had packed up quite a few years before that and I was just kind of.

I kept lying to the doctors to try and get airborne again and trying to be allowed to do my job and then it just manifested again.

So essentially I damaged two vertebrae in my neck and that final.

So the way that military do it, you have a med board and then your essentially still in for a year.

You have like a year of purgatory where you can't really go and get any job, but there's a year where you're not allowed on camp because of insurance reasons.

So you feel like you're in this horrible quicksand for a year.

So actually the time that that date arrives where you actually leave your official on paper left end service, you can't wait to unshackle yourself and get out there and move on.

But the reality is, is that the my, you know, I didn't want to leave.

But that time whenever I was sort of stuck in, in that purgatory meant that I had a sort of a false emotion of wanting to get away because that horrible last year hadn't been what I was used to.

So I think that.

And again, I sort of wanted to get away from the military.

I'd been sort of the last couple of months was so such a bad experience.

I just wanted to move on.

But the reality was that wasn't what I wanted to do.

I would have stayed in forever.

And I think, yeah, it's a strange emotion looking back now because if I would have given anything to be back in and to be staying with all my friends.

What things helped you in that time?

So you spoke about, there was counseling and what else.

What other things really helped you?

So I think friendship, you know, I had a lot of friends who gravitated around me and rallied for me and I found a lot of value in walking.

So I used to run lows like I mentioned earlier.

And then the running completely fell off the radar during lockdown and Covid and that's essentially what started to unhinge me.

But I found more value.

I basically was so unfit I couldn't run anymore.

But I found more value in going for a 20 minute or an hour walk or whatever length it happened to be with friends without my AirPods in and talking.

So offloading.

And there's a lot of science around walking beside someone when you're not looking them directly in the eye, you're more likely to open up so you can have more awkward conversations.

For example, if you're with your kids in the car because you're not looking at them, if you've got a colleague, I always suggest people go for a walk with them at lunchtime or whenever and have those hard conversations when you're walking side by side because it's less confrontational.

If you sit opposite someone, it can feel like really you versus them just even in terms of Body language.

So I found a lot of value in walking with friends and going out with and chatting to them.

And then I also got a dog.

And I have to say, I know it sounds really silly, but my little dog is absolutely saved my life.

I genuinely believe that.

And I always talk about the value of having something again that needs you to keep going.

And he's my first ever dog.

He's absolutely brilliant.

But he forces me out the wind the door every single morning for a walk and just having that sunlight, the fresh air and a couple of steps in the morning.

Because I think sometimes with human nature, you know, you can look out the window on a wet, miserable day and go, it looks so wet and miserable out there.

But when you get out there, you're like, oh, it's not so cool today.

Or it's not actually as wet as it looks from inside.

So I think the value of having a dog stops you viewing life from inside out.

And you actually get out and experience it and then you realize it's actually not that bad.

And again, that's a metaphor for everything in life.

You got to go out and experience and realize it's not that bad.

But my little dogs helped me do that.

But if someone is struggling now and they sort of resonating with some of the things you've spoken about, what are some actions they can maybe take to start to move towards that better place?

So for me, as I said earlier, like I. I'm somebody who's had thoughts of suicide in my life.

I had my first kind of serious thoughts when I was about 18, 19, and then my last serious thoughts in sort of April this year.

It's just been a recur feeling in my life.

Something that was really, really helpful for me was this theory of suicide called the fluid vulnerability model, which is a bit of a jargony title, but it's this idea that basically every single one of us has a baseline risk for suicide because we can all experience painful things.

And when that pain, if you think back to that tank, as that pain builds and builds and we're starting to hit our threshold, we then move into what this the describes as an acute suicidal mode.

When we're in that mode, there's a potential danger for life because we're now the pain is too much, we're hitting our threshold and we need to, we're potentially in danger.

And that theory for me was really helpful in my own brain to start to see if these.

Okay, there's two levels of personal intervention that I need to think about.

I need to think about when I'm in my acute mode.

In that state, what matters is moment to moment is about keeping yourself safe from moment to moment.

Because when I'm out of the mode, I want to be here, I want to live.

I'm so, you know, I've got so much hunger for life and.

But when you're in that mode, I can lose sight of that.

So for me there's one level about, that's the first level about what do you do moment to moment to keep safe.

And that's gonna be different for, you know, every, every person is, you know, and, and, and so then the, the second level in a way is around when I'm outside of that acute mode.

What are some of the things that can help me with those baseline risk things?

What are some of those things that can help me get some of that pain out of my tank over the long term?

And looking at both those levels, in both those levels, it's about an individual toolkit because for every person it's going to look different around what over the long term is going to be useful for you.

When I say it's going to look different, I think ultimately whatever you end up doing, it's going to help you.

With those three notes we spoke about earlier, it's going to potentially help you regulate your emotions and is going to hopefully help you feel better about yourself, start to feel bit by bit that you're somebody of value in this world.

And then on that third note, hopefully help you bit by bit bring yourself into more meaningful connection with other people.

But how you achieve those three things I think could look really different.

For some people it might be about sit down therapy.

For other people it might be around reading certain books about certain things.

It might be about a cold water swimming group that you go to.

And certainly I don't think it's ever going to be about one thing.

Yeah.

But about multiple, multiple things going on.

Thank you for listening to this episode.

I do hope that these conversations have helped you understand yourself or perhaps someone that you know and love a little better.

If anything that you've heard today felt familiar, then there is support available to you.

And what I'll do is I'll link stuff below.

So if you want to go and reach out and find those resources and support, go into the description in the show notes and click on the links there.

Take care of yourself.

And once again, thank you for listening.

Stay curious and I will see you in the next one.

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