War gave Liz purpose. Peace nearly took her life.

Liz McConaghy spent 17 years flying on the RAF Chinook Fleet, completing deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and serving on the Medical Emergency Response Team. Surrounded by people, purpose and teamwork, she learned to function in some of the most dangerous environments imaginable.

But the chapter that nearly ended her life began after she left.

Following a medical discharge from the RAF, the loss of her military identity, the breakdown of her marriage, the death of a close friend and the isolation of lockdown, Liz began experiencing symptoms of PTSD without recognising what was happening.

In this deeply honest conversation, Liz shares the journey from war zones to loneliness, depression and a suicide attempt, and the long, non-linear process of finding purpose, identity and hope again.

We explore why unprocessed trauma can return years later, how grief can follow the loss of a career or relationship, why people in the military and emergency services learn to normalise danger, and what happens when the uniform that defined your life is suddenly taken away.

Liz also shares practical ways to support someone who is struggling: asking twice, giving your mental health a number out of ten, opening up about your own vulnerability, having difficult conversations while walking side by side and seeking help before reaching crisis point.

This is a conversation about PTSD, military life, loneliness, identity, suicide prevention, mental health recovery, grief, purpose and learning to believe that the light can come back on.

In this episode:

→ Why peace became harder for Liz to survive than war

→ Life as the longest-serving female RAF Chinook crewman

→ Iraq, Afghanistan and the Medical Emergency Response Team

→ The hidden grief of losing a career, relationship and identity

→ How PTSD appeared years after leaving the military

→ The phone call Liz does not remember making that saved her life

→ Why recovery is rarely a straight line

→ How to help someone open up without forcing them

→ Why asking “How are you?” twice can make a difference

→ Finding an identity beyond the uniform

→ Why nobody needs to reach rock bottom before deserving help

Follow Liz:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chinookcrewchick/

X: https://x.com/chinnychick

Website: https://www.chinookcrewchick.co.uk/

Read or listen to Chinook Crew ‘Chick’:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chinook-Crew-Chick-Longest-Crewmember-ebook/dp/B0BNC5PW8Y

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?

Oh, goodness, that is a brilliant opening question.

Right inside for a side punch 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 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 unraveling 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 know, tents that there's, you know, 10 to 12 of you living in the same tent.

Even the accommodation blocks is usually two to a 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 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.

Yeah.

What did that, even if it was a brief decompression, look like in that moment?

So we would go after every single sortie Whether it was one of those sort of saving lives, merch sorties, or whether.

Or this deliberate operation where you're getting shot at or RPG'd or something particularly traumatic happens on the aircraft and we have to use the weapons, open up and that kind of thing.

And we would always debrief.

We debrief as air crew, we debrief every single thing we do.

So even the benign sorties, we would still have a debrief, but it gives you time, sort of, for people to get perspective on stuff, because there might be something that somebody else saw that you didn't see, or you might have an overwhelming thought that, you know, if you'd done something quicker, if you'd flown quicker, or if you'd got to the aircraft quicker, you could have saved a life.

And we were very lucky.

We actually had the medics in with those debriefs, so the medics would be able to give us the perspective and say, look, didn't matter how fast you flew, that patient was still going to die.

So I think debriefs are really good at filling in those gaps because your brain actually can start to play tricks on you a lot of the time, and you see a lot of trauma, your brain can shut down for certain points of it to protect itself, which means you fill in the gaps.

So it's really important, I think, when you go through any kind of trauma scenario, to have a debrief with the people that were there.

It's different to kind of debriefing.

And externally, which, don't get me wrong, has its value, and I'm sure we'll talk about that later, the value of counseling and chatting to external people to get perspective.

But chatting with people that were there was really, really important.

And in terms of my own personal moments of reflection, because we couldn't get that time and that space alone, I found it in the gym.

So I would do a lot of running.

And I always joke that I could barely run a mile and a half when I joined the raf.

And then I was like Forrest Gump at one point, because it was my way of just emptying that metaphorical bucket that we talk about.

And, you know, when I say run, it wasn't just a quick 5k.

I'd be on the treadmill for hours, just emptying that brain and just decompressing and ordering all the thoughts.

Yeah, so many people find their outlet in exercise of some sort.

It's such a common thing.

And, like, even if you're running, a lot of people run with music.

But if you can run without that, you just.

Yeah, you're.

You have to.

You're forcing yourself to spend that time in your mind and, like, reflect on things.

And then when you go to have that debrief with other people, you can maybe speak to them about those things.

And the importance of talking to people who have been through the same thing as you in that moment, you sometimes understand things a different way and you realize that someone else saw it a different way.

So that coming together and like, discussing it is such an important thing in that moment.

Yeah.

And so many people.

I think if it hasn't affected you, it's very easy to go, I don't need to debrief, I'm fine.

But you don't realize that somebody else might need you to debrief and might need to hear your perspective on things.

So I think if you've got the opportunity to have it, then why not?

I do a lot of talks these days for nhs, and NHS do not have the luxury of debriefs.

They just don't have time.

They.

The way the shift patterns work, they don't.

And they tend to debrief when something goes wrong.

And that then puts this kind of stigma on a debrief of, you know, we only debriefing when something's gone wrong and there's a finger of blame going to be pointed.

But the way that the military do it is they debrief after everything, good or bad, which takes away that stigma.

I mean, the Red Arrows are like, not particular Red Arrows fan.

I just put that in there.

We have a little bit of banter between the helicopter fleet and the Arya or the.

The Fast Jet Boys.

But I have to say, the way they do, it's really good because they take the personality out of a debrief.

So they call themselves Red one to nine.

And because of that, they.

They basically.

Nobody's got personality in it.

So it makes it very, like, sort of analytical.

And I think that's a really good way to do it.

But I just think, you know, even if you don't think that you need it, you never know who else that was involved in the incident might need it.

And you also don't know that you maybe don't think you need it at the time.

You package it up and put it in the back of your brain.

That term Pandora's box, which I actually hate, but it kind of does describe where we store stuff.

But if you can process it at the time, why not, you know, why not sort of fold it all up in a nice and neat pile instead of crumpling up and cramming it in the box.

Absolutely.

I.

For about a year, maybe about a year ago now, I did volunteering for the Samaritans.

So on the phone lines, taking the calls for people in crisis, people struggling, lonely, all of that sort of stuff.

And one of the things people always ask me is, how did you deal with listening to that stuff?

And the answer is always the debrief.

The debrief they do there is so good, because you debrief as you go after calls between the two of you on shift at the same time, but then you also have to call someone else who's not there in the room and debrief to them separately as well, who's the leader.

So it becomes this whole process that means that as soon as you walk out that door and you leave that room, you leave that all behind.

And I just think it's so good, it's so simple but effective.

And like, say good and bad, it's all important.

Yeah, it's incredible that you do that.

By the way, the Samaritans were.

The night of my overdose, which we might come on to, I called the Samaritans, actually only on the call for 13 seconds.

So I don't know what was said on that call, but straight after that, called 91 1.

I don't know why, by the way, but that's the phone quality of my life.

So I've always had, you know, a huge respect for anyone that does any smart and stuff.

I think you're incredible people.

When you.

When you got back home and you started to realize that you were struggling, was there part of you that thought that because you'd been to war, you'd been to Iraq and Afghanistan, you survived those, So I must be fine.

Like, how is this the thing that's going to break me?

You know, it's a really good point.

I think I'd suffered quite a lot of loss towards the end of my career in the military, so I was medically discharged in the raf.

So it meant that my career was kind of ripped away from me before I intended to leave.

So that was a huge amount of loss.

But because, you know, I think sometimes when we lose a job like that, you.

To co.

The friends term, pivot, and we, you know, I pivoted in a different direction.

I thought, well, this is great.

You know, I've been let off the leash.

I'm out of the military, I can do whatever I want.

I'm so lucky.

And the reality was I was just fooling myself because I was just.

I just lost the most important thing to me.

I joined when I was 19 years old, but I didn't take time to grieve that loss.

I'd lost a friend to cancer and threw myself into keeping busy whenever we were organizing her funeral, et cetera.

And I'd also.

My marriage had broken down at the end of my military career, and I haven't really grieved that loss because of my choice to leave.

So I thought, well, you know, you made your bed, you've got to lie on it.

This is your choice.

Get on with life.

And they were big losses, but I didn't really kind of take time to acknowledge all that came with them, you know, the loss of friends, the loss of assets and a house and all those kind of things.

So that loss was the thing that was starting to build up like big dominoes.

And you're right, whenever I started to kind of unravel, I thought, you know, Liz, you're stronger than this.

You know, all that stuff you've done before and.

But I almost wasn't even noticing that I was unraveling.

It was happening so slowly.

It felt like I was just, I guess, to be realistic, you know, we were during lockdown and I stopped go.

I used to run loads.

I used to cycle, do Iron man triathlons.

I stopped doing that, developed insomnia and started eating loads of sugar.

That was kind of my coping mechanism now.

And I replaced that, the sport, with sugar.

So I was putting on weight and I was just unraveling that way.

And I was almost beating myself up more for just being really lazy and unmoved, unmotivated, because I haven't recognized signs of PTSD manifesting.

And I think, you know, if I'd have had more memory training during my military career about ptsd, I would have spotted it quicker and gone, oh, you're not just lazy, unmotivated, still in your pajamas at 3 o' clock for no reason, Liz.

This is what's happening.

But I started to start to sort of beat myself up more for just putting on wear and not wanting to go for a run and all that kind of stuff.

And.

And that then impacted my mental health more and put me deeper in that hole.

And it's really hard to climb out of when you feel like, you know, you're like, tomorrow morning I'm going to get up and I'm going to go for that run, and then you wake up and you're just in the black hole.

Again.

And it is.

And then the cycle begins again.

You eat loads of sugar, you end up not sleeping.

The next day you feel like feeling worse.

And that's a horrible.

I call it spiral, but you just get hole.

So.

And I think, you know, I replaced the fizz side of things that sort of the running and whatnot with sugar and binge eating, just sugar.

But I think a lot of people, you know, drink or do drugs.

Alcohol is a very common one or, or the gym, but in a very toxic way.

You know, people over train sometimes for the same reason.

So I think I didn't really recognize what was happening for most of those months as I was starting to unravel.

Yeah, it's so.

It's.

Sorry.

It's so easy to look back on and say and see these things, but when you're in it, it's such a difficult place to.

To see that from.

One of the things that really stood out to me just then whilst you were speaking is the way you described those events.

So really sort of traumatic things you went through in a short space of time.

Losing a job, losing a friend and losing a partner.

But you use the word grieve for those things.

And we tend to use grief for losing a life, but we don't always use it for losing a job or losing a relationship.

Is that something that you've always used to describe or is that something you've sort of noticed in passing?

Yeah, well, picked up on.

No, it was sort of through my counseling.

I say after that we had about three or four years of counseling and that word grief came up quite a lot.

And it was so weird because it isn't an obvious term to use grieving a marriage, you know, or grieving a job.

But it's true that loss manifests in exactly the same way, almost more so because there's almost a blueprint for how you grieve when someone dies, right.

You have a funeral, you pack up their belongings, you say goodbye properly and.

And it's very final.

That grief is final.

And there's a, say, a very formatted way to do that.

But grieving loss of marriage, loss of job doesn't ever feel so final.

And it also, at least whenever it's the loss of a person, it's out of your control.

They have died.

There's nothing you can do about that.

Whereas when you're grieving someone, for example, or a job, you very much.

I was medically discharged, so I kept thinking, oh, I should have stayed in and maybe done a desk job or when My marriage had broken down.

I remember thinking, is there something I could have done to stop this happening?

And you do.

You just sort of question it all the time.

So you're almost trying to deal with that semi grief because you're in, like, purgatory and.

But you still lost belongings.

And it's almost more personal because that grief of losing a marriage or a job, it almost impacts you.

When you're grieving, somebody's died, you're grieving a different person.

You're not grieving their belongings and their things, but whenever it's you and it's your life, it's almost more impactful, I think, and more elongated.

And there's no blueprint of how to do it.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's something.

I've spoken to people on this podcast before.

I spoke to a grief expert who was explaining that we should look at those things as grief and even smaller events and starting to talk about things in that way.

When we do lose something that's important to us, it's a form of grief.

Like, we've got to give ourselves the time to experience that and sort of make our own journey through that.

Yeah.

And not rush it, allow it to happen.

I think too old, often people are like, right, it's done.

Let's move on.

Next, next, Next focus.

And especially when you're in the military, you know, you don't want to waste.

Time wasted is useless time.

You know, we've got to fill every unit of the day.

I know I'm very guilty of that.

You know, I like to have my units of time blocked out during the day, and I fill every single unit of that time doing useful stuff.

I hate the idea of just, oh, I've wasted a whole hour there.

So I think people just want to pack it up and move on.

And you shouldn't, you know, allow it to come and go like waves a bit like any sort of black dog description, you know, with mental illness.

Allow the dog to come.

Everyone always talks about the black dog coming like it's a bad thing.

Allow it to come and spend some time with it, have a chat with it, you know, enjoy its company almost for a while, and then pat it on the nose and the head or whatever and let it go.

But I think the more you fight these things, the more it becomes like the big bad thing that's in the room.

Whereas if you just go, oh, you're here again today, and sit with it and then let it go, that's probably an important way to repackage it in your Head.

Yeah.

I spoke to Mary Howe, who.

She was actually an AC130 gunner in the US, and she was talking about the term letting go, about how we can never truly let anything go.

And the idea there that it's so important to process the grief, because you can process it and let it go out of that moment, but there may be something that brings it back up.

It may be a location, it may be a smell, it may be a bit of music, and it can suddenly take you back to that moment.

And if you haven't done the processing at the start, that can really throw you back into that moment.

But if you've processed it, like you say there, welcome the dog back in and just say, you're back, you're back again.

I've dealt with you already.

And then send it on its way.

I think I wanted to write another book about my time in Afghanistan with my squadron.

And I actually contacted quite a lot of people about potentially having a chapter each.

And so many people got back to me and said, liz, I'm not ready to revisit that yet.

So many people have packaged the stuff that went on in Afghanistan, especially on Merck, really, and put it in the back of their brains and they're scared to open that box.

And very much the day of my ob, Bruce, I opened that box and the files went everywhere.

And it took me many years to kind of process, you know, read the files, read the trauma, read the grief, accept it, and then file it away again nice and neatly in the back of my brain.

So it's still there, it's still in the back of my brain.

But I say it's in a filing cabinet now, not a lockbox.

So I can go and I can visit those memories, I can speak about them freely.

It's kind of my job not to talk on stage about trauma and my experiences from Afghan.

But it doesn't throw me under the bus every time because I have processed them.

And that is a sign of healing.

You know, the less emotions attached to those memories, that is a good sign of healing.

But I think for everyone, the more you can process at the time, then you're filing it away instead of locking it away.

And I think that's a slightly different way to think about things.

Absolutely, yeah.

Really, really spot on.

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 a damaged two vertebrae in my neck.

And that final.

So the way that military do it, you have a med board and then you're 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 last day in service, you can't wait to unshackle yourself and get out there and.

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.

You served for many years.

You started your career quite young.

You started at 19, which I suppose maybe for a military person, that's quite a common starting age.

But to anyone listening, that's quite a young age to go into such that.

Such an extreme sort of environment.

What was it you were joining for at that time of your life?

Well, I think my older brother joined the army and whenever he joined the army, I kind of saw the forces as a really good career to go out of Northern Ireland and to make a difference and have that purpose.

And so that was kind of really wanted to do.

I wanted to do something that made a difference every day.

I didn't want a boring, like job that was just.

He'd get up, he'd go to work, he do the grind and you get the money at the end of the week or the end of the month.

I wanted something actually made a difference.

And that was really what drew me to the forces in the first place.

Not some sort of war junkie of like, oh, I can't wait to get my hands on a weapon and go and fly in a war zone.

But I knew that the military had that reputation.

And this, don't forget this was way before Afghanistan.

It was before any of the Iraq Afghanistan stuff.

So the world was quite a benign place at that point.

Whenever I was doing all my kind of like interviews to join.

And then obviously 911 happened and I don't even think I realized I joined a week after 911 happened and that single event then kind of exploded my career into this really, really busy one.

But I'm also thankful that that happened because as not, I think it would have been a very different, quite boring career.

I would not have anywhere near the stories that I have to tell.

And yes, I wouldn't have the trauma that I hold.

But that trauma and all that stuff like we spoke about earlier, it weaves itself into your personality and your patterns, your behaviors.

And I think it's a good thing.

I always say you grow through what you go through and the more life that you go through, the deeper person you are, the more self aware, just more interesting.

And I think, you know, people who have had a very sheltered life are fairly boring to chat to down the pub, whereas if you've been to war a couple of times, you've probably got some pretty good stories as well.

Yeah, I think what you said there about suffering, I think going through difficult times is where we learn from and it's never going to be nice in the moment, it's never going to be nice straight after.

And depending how long you sort of hold on to that and lock that box, as you said earlier, it can be not, not nice for a long time.

But those are things we learn from and we learn whether that's things about the world, whether it's things about ourself and how we react to things.

But I do think there's a lot to be said and like you said there people who have lived life, people who have been through things, do have these stories to tell, but also the lessons to share from it.

Ye.

And I'm definitely more outwardly aware of other people now as well.

You know, just knowing especially blue light services, they've done quite a lot of talks with blue light services and being able to connect with people on a different level because I know they have not got the same experiences as me, but they've got similar experiences of trauma.

Loss, normalizing trauma, normalizing danger.

And I think that's a really common thing with certainly what you do for a living, what any sort of NHS workers, ambulance workers, even prison officers.

You know, you normalize this really weird environment where it's constant danger and your fight or flight response is switched on constantly.

And switching your fight or flight response on all the time is actually not great for your brain because it's overcoming your reasoned thought.

Because your reason thought is there's the lion coming into the room, I'm going to run out of the room.

That's what normal people do.

But anyone in the blue light doesn't tend to do that, do they?

They go to the fight and that is constantly overriding your reasoned thought.

So it does have a long term lasting effect.

The longer you have that switched on for and especially when you're doing a job where you're not even, you know, some of the time in Afghanistan we were on shift but we were on standby even if the phone never rang.

You're on this heightened awareness all the time, much the same as yourselves.

I suspect even when you're off shift.

For a lot of people in the blue light services, you don't ever really relax because you know if there's an incident somewhere, if there's a car crash on the way to work, if there's an incident at your kids school or you're going to get called in or you're going to gas to be help to help.

And so you never really switch that fight or flight response off.

Yeah, it's always on in the back of your mind like anything like the day could change just like that.

At what point of it was, did the role of helicopter crewman stand out to you?

Was it before you joined?

Was it as you were joining?

Going through.

It was the day that I went to careers office with my brother, so he was joining the army.

And I saw a magazine and the magazine had a helicopter on the front of it and this guy hanging out in the side of the helicopter.

And I just went, that is cool.

So I asked the guys in uniform what the job was and they explained it a little bit to me and I didn't know anything about it.

I'd never even heard of this job before.

But it just looked so unique and so cool that that was kind of what really drew me to it.

And I think maybe not naively was a good thing.

You know, even going through basic training I was, I always described myself as Private Benjamin.

You know, I didn't know how to march I hadn't.

I wasn't a cadet at.

So I had no military bearing, I knew nothing about the forces and I was saluting everything on the main gate, including the corporal.

You know, I just did not understand military life at all.

But that naivety was almost what made it so much fun to get through.

I think sometimes if you, if you're a little bit older and a little bit more sort of seasoned, then you kind of.

You don't want to be ironing your bed space at 4am, whereas I was like, well, this is fun.

And, you know, it was all really novel at the time.

And I think joining the military so young was actually what did me, you know, good in the end.

It certainly.

I grew up pretty quickly, let's be honest.

You know, the three months of basic training changed me hugely.

And then everything else after that.

Definitely.

If you were describing the role to yourself in that careers office or to anyone listening who doesn't know what that role actually is, could you just explain that to us?

Yeah.

So a helicopter crewman, and it's now called crew person.

We love all the PC ness, It's essentially the eyes and ears of the pilot.

So any helicopter, really, they have like one or two pilots at the front and they obviously cannot see what's going on down the back, and most of the time they're strapped to the cockpit.

So the crewman is in charge of all the stuff that comes inside the aircraft.

Passengers, freight, anything that goes underneath the aircraft and on the unshin load hooks.

We brief everyone when they're coming aboard the aircraft, but we also do a lot of the navigation and radios now just to take a bit of capacity off the pilot.

But I guess our basic bread and butter is voice marshaling, which is essentially talking the aircraft onto the ground in those latter sections of flight.

So the pilot, you know, gets you.

I always call them glorified taxi drivers, which they love.

But the pilots get us from A to B, and then when we get to B and we're doing that fine maneuvering either to get into a tight landing site or, or to land on a ship, a slope, or to pick up an unstrung load.

You know, we voice marshal them to the overhead or clear of any trees or goalposts or whatever it happens to be that the aircraft could potentially fly into.

So we kind of do the finer positioning for the pilot to Then land the thing on the ground.

So we're always almost a jack of all trades, master of none.

We do.

But anything comes our way, we try and get on with it.

Amazing.

How many people would there be on a helicopter?

So a Chinook, which I was on for my whole career, we had two pilots up the front and two crewmen down the back.

When you're doing some of the instrument flying training, you can afford to have one crewman.

There's not that much to do down the back.

Some of the other helicopters, you'll still have two pilots at the front, but you might only need one crewman down the back because they're just not as big.

They don't have as much capacity for freight and those kind of things.

So you can get away with just having one crewman who does everything.

Whereas it was great on being on Chinooks, because whenever you had landaways and things and you were going somewhere overnight, you always had a mate who you were in the same mess as, because we had different messes for the officers and for the crewmen.

So you always had a mate to go down the pub with or whatever, which is good.

So, yeah.

Oh, nice.

And somebody else to get in trouble with when I went wrong as well.

Which is more importantly.

Yeah, there was a time for you where you were the only female crew person on the Chinook wing.

How did you.

Did that change your experience in any way?

Did you notice that or did other people notice that?

I think the biggest thing was there was nowhere to hide, you know, even silly little things like parking my car, if I parked it badly, somebody was a little blonde female grooming.

And it wasn't as if there was loads of us that couldn't go, which one?

So it was silly little things like that.

But I have to say, and I think the Forces get really bad rep these days.

And don't get me wrong, there has been some horrific stories that come out, but they are so.

When you look at them, they're such a minority compared to the bigger, wider forces, community.

And certainly my time in the Forces, you know, even from day one, unloading my bags in the bus at Cranwell was very inclusive.

You know, the lads were there, we were one team.

We failed or succeeded together.

I was never, ever single out to be the weaker sex because I was a female or a burden in any way.

And we literally were just like a big family.

And on a night out, it was like having 60 big brothers, you know, it was hilarious.

I couldn't pull a boyfriend for loving her money because they had this ring of steel around me.

But, you know, it's a. I think it's just a really important point to make that actually the majority of females in the forces do have a really amazing time.

And I've always said it's about having the best person for the job.

You know, I think I learned really early on in my career that, yeah, I was not the strongest girl and the guys could pick up a lot of the kit and carry it much quicker than I could.

But whenever we were putting vehicles inside the aircraft, I could get under the vehicles much quicker because I was smaller to attach them to the floor.

And again, it's probably the same in the firefighting world.

You know, you have smaller people have a skill set to bring and they can climb through smaller windows, they can get into smaller spaces.

So I think it's really important for everyone to remember, you know, that we all have something to bring to the party and whether or not that size, shape, way of thinking, you know, different educations, different religions, different sexes bring something to the party and just know that you have a strength to bring to that team.

And I think that was where the Chinook force were really inclusive in that respect.

They were really good.

And even when we grew the numbers, we never swelled the numbers of crewmen, female crewmen, to I think five in the heyday.

So it was all.

We were always in the minority, but we were, we were always really well looked after.

That's good to hear.

And this.

Yeah, so true that there's.

Everyone has their own strengths and their own weaknesses, regardless of who you are.

So it's just ensuring that everyone's in the.

On the same wavelength.

You're all there to do the same job at the end of the day.

Yeah.

And as long as we can all do that, then absolutely fine.

I think one thing I did have a tendency to do was to probably overperform as a female because I didn't want to be the girl crying around the back of the tent.

So I held a lot of that emotion inside.

I was also at the peak of my fitness as well because I thought, well, I don't want to be the girl that kind of holds everyone back if we have to go on the run in Afghanistan.

So I was overperforming in things because I didn't want to show any chinks in the armor.

And I think that's quite a common thing with females in very male dominated roles.

They tend to overperform.

Even though none of the blokes ever made me feel like a burden or the weaker sex in any way.

That pressure came from me to overperform.

And it's the same, I think, if you're in the minority in any job, whether or not you're the oldest on the team, the youngest on the team, the newest person, someone from a different background or a different country, if you are in the minority, you have this tendency to overperform, because, again, you just don't want to be that burden or show any weakness.

It's quite common, I think.

Yeah, that's an interesting point, that that sort of internal pressure you put on yourself.

Do you think that internal pressure ever had a negative effect on you or led to some of the negative things that then went on later on?

Probably when I started to unravel, I didn't want to reach out for help.

I didn't want to be a burden.

And, you know, all the time in Afghanistan, we saw some pretty horrific things.

I never cried once.

And crying is your body's natural response to trauma.

You know, if you run and fall and cut your knee, your knee bleeds.

That's your body's response to that.

If you experience sad things or.

Or a loss or experience death, your body wants to cry.

That's what it wants to do.

And I suppressed all those tears the whole time I was in Helmand.

And I think that obviously then built up, you know, all that feeling and emotion inside me.

But also when I was unraveling, I didn't.

I had some of the best friends in the world who were still like family from the Air Force.

I obviously had my own family and my civil mates around me, but I just didn't want to reach out and ask for help because I didn't want to show that weakness or be a burden.

And that very much that pressure came from inside me.

Nobody else ever said that, oh, Liz, you're being a burden.

But that was how I felt.

And that's a really common feeling for people that are struggling.

Is that that word, burden?

People think that they're going to be a burden to someone, but it's such a.

When there's someone around you that you love and care for, you'd want to know that they're going through that.

And you.

You wouldn't feel that they're being a burden.

You'd feel like almost honored in a way that they're willing to open up to you and share that with you.

But it's so different when we're in our own minds, right?

We.

We know that that's not true.

In a way, but we just, we're adamant and that's.

That so often overrides whatever we know to be true.

And if you know someone's struggling and then you find out, what's the first thing you say to them?

Why didn't you tell me?

So I, you know, but we are very good at dishing out advice but not taking it for ourselves, I think a lot of the time in life.

So I always say, now, if you know someone's struggling and they won't open up, try and show about your own vulnerability.

Because suddenly if you become vulnerable and you say, look, I'm really struggling at the minute with this, or I'm feeling really low about this, people tend to open up a bit more then because it's almost like you're standing, holding the door open, going, come and walk through this with me.

And I find that response a lot.

Whenever I do talks on stage, you know, I stand there, I'm very vulnerable about my trauma and my story.

And it's almost like I'm giving people the okay to talk about their own stories.

So I always get at least 10% of the audience, depending on, you know, maybe 80 to 800 in the audience, but whoever, you know, there's at least 10% will always come up at the end and share something or be in tears or I've opened a tap and suddenly they feel like it's okay to start talking about this stuff and let it out.

So I think, you know, there's so, so often I get asked by people, how do I get my mate to open up and he just won't lose.

I'm saying, well, instead of prodding them like, you know, like prodding one of those fish that clam up whenever, you know, you're attacking it, be the opposite, you know, you know, open up about your own things and suddenly they'll start to gravitate and maybe want to share something that they're going through as well.

That's such a great idea and really, really useful suggestion for anyone listening because I've, I've seen that in first person, but I've never sort of thought about bringing that into a one on one setting.

Like I've seen talks where people have opened up about their own experiences, their own stories, and at the end people either put their hands up and say, I've been through something really similar, or I'm going through something really similar.

I have this question, whatever it is, and I'm like, that's so powerful.

But then it's so simple to Say, do it in a one on one setting, but I've never thought of that.

I think that's just.

Yeah, great idea.

And it doesn't need to matter if what you're going through is really small or you.

You even make it up.

You know, you can make it something, you can make it more of a mind tonight on Molehill.

But if you know that someone's struggling, you just want them to open up, then make yourself as vulnerable as you can.

And then, because otherwise it's like, you know, Superman prodding someone going, go on, what?

Tell me what's wrong, Tell me what's wrong.

Yeah, and then people are just going to climb up even more because that divide gets bigger.

Yeah, so true.

I've heard you speak before about something you got told about the reason for living and the guy in the ditch who's bleeding out.

So that being the reason to keep going.

What does that mean to you?

So, yeah, it was one of my instructors during basic training and he said he was a helicopter instructor.

And he told me whenever I was going through my baby Chinook crewman training that it's always about the guy in the ditch.

Liz.

So your reason for getting up every morning is to go and get that guy who really needs you out of the ditch.

And that stayed with me in my whole career.

You know, we would put ourselves a huge amount of risk to go and get that guy who was bleeding out on the battlefield.

And you do put yourself last because, you know he needs you.

And not in some kind of weird Mother Teresa way, but they do.

You know, the half of the squaddies always said to me that they would.

Just knowing that the Chinook was there waiting to come and get them meant it was easier to get out the front gate to go on patrol because they knew that somebody had their back and was going to be there if the shit hit the fan, so to speak.

And I think that has carried on after that, you know, with my.

I lost my purpose during lockdown.

And I think that's what really unraveled me because I just didn't feel like I was making a difference to anyone every day.

You know, I applied for so many volunteer jobs during lockdown, I didn't get any of them.

And then just kind of wallowed and wallowed out of control.

Whereas now with the book being out and the talks that I do and the motivational stuff I do, I feel like I can still help people every single day.

And I do, you know, every day I get messages from people who've either read the book or heard a podcast and it's helped them in some way or something's resonated and they've gone to seek help from themselves or they've recognized symptoms in someone else and said, right, now I know what that is and I want to go and get them some help.

So I think I've got that sense of purpose back, but it's still helping the person in the ditch, just helping that one person who cannot leave the house who is really struggling just to get out of bed every day.

The lowest common denominator.

Helping them is the most important thing because, yeah, you're going to get CEOs and you're going to get really extremely motivated.

People are going to struggle.

But it's the people who on the shop floor, like, literally the people walking along the streets who just cannot get out of that hole, are the people I want to help as much as possible.

Yeah.

I mean, the person in the ditch who's bleeding out is ultimately just a metaphor for anyone who's struggling.

Right.

So you can carry that through to what you do now.

And the people you're helping, who maybe in a dark room, not able to get out of bed like you were, you were saying that you've experienced and it may be someone who's gone through something and maybe lost a partner and they're grieving that.

Yeah.

And whoever that person is, that's now your purpose is to help them get through that and to get back to being themselves, essentially.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, I do look at my life, what we are now, 20, 26, six years ago, I genuinely knew I wasn't leaving the house this time of year.

I wasn't leaving the house.

We were in the thick of lockdown.

I was, you know, just really struggling to get out and even to do the dishes and to have a shower.

You know, I was having a shower every three or four days.

And you just think it's not the one that you see in front of you today.

And it has been a healing journey.

But I think it's really important for people who are in that place to see that the light will come back on.

It's like being in a dark room and not being able to find the light switch.

And it can be really exhausting searching for the light switch all the time, but you might find it on your own, or someone might hand you a torch to help you find it, but the light switch is there and it will come back on at some point and you will find the light again.

But, you know don't give up hope.

Because I look back at my life now and just think, you know, how it hasn't been an upward trend, you know, it's been a long journey.

There's been potholes along the way.

I've had two steps forward, one step back.

But two steps forward, one step back sounds like such a negative term.

But it's still progress.

It's still moving in the right direction.

And you need to remember that.

Yeah.

And a lot of people may start that journey expecting it to be like.

A smooth, linear fashion.

Yeah.

It's never.

It's like there's always going to be ups and down.

There's peaks and troughs.

If you were to map it on a graph, it's going to be a zigzag.

Yeah.

But it's going to be going in the right direction.

Yeah.

And it's such an important to make a point to make there from yourself.

So thank you for that.

And counseling helps.

You know, I would say I had different counselors throughout my time, sort of of as I put life back together.

And I always say concerts, like shoes, you have to get the right fit.

And I went through loads of different counselors, and some of them were absolutely amazing, but they just didn't fit me and my personality.

And it's really important to recognize that and move on because they know that as much as you do that they'll not be offended if you say, look, I'm just not feeling this and moving on to someone else.

Because you're not going to get the same benefit if you're always guarded around someone.

So you have to get the right shoe.

And that is important.

And I think, you know, counselors and the same with meds.

You know, I took a lot of antidepressants over the years, and it was something I was staunchly against at the start.

But I then realized that actually the right medication really can pull you out of that hole.

And people are so against medication.

But the reality is, you know, it's like you put a cast on a broken leg.

So why are people so against a bit of medication?

To help you just get level.

You don't have to stay on it forever.

And again, I'm walking proof that you can get the medication, can put your brain chemicals back in the right place, and then you can come off those medic those meds slowly.

Yeah.

It's a treatment in that moment.

And I think that's what people find, that some people just stay on them forever.

But they say it's such an important thing in those moments where you do need that thing to just take you out of that depth of the hole.

What things helped you in that time?

So you spoke about those counseling and um, what, 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 find 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 unhinge me.

But I, 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 walk 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, 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 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 cold 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 help me do that.

That idea of being next to someone, and you were saying about, like, looking in the same direction, you're next to someone, whether that's walking, whether that's in their car.

I've done a lot of episodes of this podcast on mental health and specifically men's mental health as well, a lot of them.

And one thing that men especially travel with, but also some women, everyone's different.

That's the.

That's the thing we have to remember, is that everyone is an individual.

And you.

Some things will work for some people, some for other people, and men especially, who've been told not to open up about emotions and sort of stiff upper lip to get them to sit down in a chair opposite a therapist and sort of open up on some of these things that they've never told anyone, maybe don't even tell themselves is such a difficult thing.

But just going out with either for a walk, for a run, for a drive, you're next to this person.

And I watch at work, we go out for a run once a week before, before our day shift.

And some of the conversations I've had there, people just open up a little bit more because we're all running in the same direction.

We're just chatting general conversation, and then suddenly a little bit just creeps out, and we just go a little bit deeper, and then it just reverts to what we were.

Yeah, it's such an important point.

Totally.

And I hear the term are you okay?

Because if you ask someone, are you okay?

It's a very pointed question.

It's almost an attacking question, and it's a closed question, so they can go yes or no.

Whereas you ask someone, how are you?

It's softer.

It allows them to reply with slightly more, you know, they can expand on their answer.

But I also think the time it takes them to reply is sometimes an indicator.

If they respond really quickly with, yeah, I'm good, thanks.

How are you?

It's no.

It could potentially be a cover.

Whereas if people pause, take their time to answer, you're probably getting a more genuine answer.

But I always say to people to give your mental health a number now, you know, out of 10.

So I ask people all the time now, what's your number out of 10?

Because it allows people to, I guess, pin their mental health on a number without actually having to say why.

You know, if someone says to me, I'm a two or three this week, Liz, okay, do you fancy going for a walk do you fancy coffee?

And they don't even have to tell me why.

It's just like put their number on.

And it's a system I use and it allows me, myself to identify what was just a really crappy Monday in January where I've had a heavy weekend on the booze.

It's grim outside.

I'm a three out of 10 because it's Monday.

But if I'm a three or four out of 10 for a couple of days or weeks running, I know I've hit a dip again, a trough.

So I think it's quite a good way of looking for those trends, but also just keeping an eye on your mates.

And a lot of my mates use it with me now.

Liz, how you doing?

What's your number?

And again, it's just a really simple way that you can do it with your mates on the bottom of an email, you can do it around a group team meeting, around the table, you can do it with your pubs down the mate, your mates down the pub on a Friday night, but your kids around the dinner table.

And it's such a simple system for kids to understand.

But the most inspiring thing you could do as adults in the room is when they ask you back, you go, actually, mum's A3 today.

Well, why is mum A3?

Well, because I missed my friend or I lost, I miss daddy or whatever it happens to be, but be open and authentic because then you're setting that example to those younger generation.

So I think it's really important to do that and also ask people twice how they are because very often if you ask someone once, they'll fob you off, they hold the mask up, they've got a packaged canned answer ready to go.

Mine was always living the dream, how are you?

And you know, if you ask someone, how are you really?

That sometimes is enough to crack that eggshell.

And we're all, especially us in the services and blue lights, we're hard boiled in the middle and it takes a lot to crack that egg.

So asking someone twice can be a really useful tool to get under the skin.

Totally agree.

And the, the number system, again, really good.

Just not putting the pressure on them to tell you what's going on.

Yeah.

But just enough to tell you that things aren't as good as they should be.

Yeah.

Talk me through the day of your overdose.

You mentioned it briefly earlier, if you're happy to just tell me sort of what you remember that experience.

So I'd been unraveling pretty much from all of lockdown, so I think we locked down in the march, didn't we?

And things were starting to unravel pretty quickly.

And I developed the insomnia, the binge eating and say I was sort of just spiraling into this hole.

And I knew it was in a bad way.

The June, I couldn't sleep one night and started to look up with my logbook all the soldiers who had died in the back of our aircraft.

So, like, the red flags really were flying that I was not in a good way and I was starting to suffer with ptsd, but I didn't ask for help.

And then the week of the overdose, well, I'd actually been out on a Saturday night with a friend and on the Sunday decided I really needed to get some sleep.

It was really struggling.

And I'd been prescribed a drug called amitriptyline for my neck while I was in the military.

And that's a very widely prescribed drug.

I guarantee there'd be people listening to this who have heard of it or are on it, because it's a drug that's prescribed for neck pain, nerve injuries, it's a sleeping tablet, any chronic kind of pain or injuries.

But it's also an antidepressant, which I didn't know.

So I start.

I took the Amitriptyline to help me get to sleep on the Monday, another on the Tuesday, and it was a Wednesday.

I woke up and basically felt like I'd been body snatched by the grim reapers, the term I always use, because I instantly had these thoughts of wanting to end my life.

I reached out for help, and as the day went on, so the GP called me back and said, look, I'll prescribe you some antidepressants.

And I went and got them in the afternoon, but at no point did he say, do you want to speak to someone?

He also hadn't seen that I'd reordered Amitriptyline on the Monday and didn't ask if I was on any of the meds.

And it was the amitriptyline that had basically tiptoed into my pretty broken brain at this point and was amplifying all those thoughts, because that's how antidepressants work.

They kind of put you in a negative headspace before they start to pull you out of that the M headspace.

So the amitryptyline was really magnifying all the negative, negative thoughts.

And I went across in the afternoon to the pharmacy and got two bags of drugs, one of amitriptyline and one of this sertraline that he prescribed.

Me.

And it is like being a robot.

I always say it was like watching my life through a lens that day because I'd already checked out of life.

I was in the departure lounge.

And again, coming back to that fight or flight response.

I said, when you're switched on, all the time overcomes your reason thought.

My reason thought was not working.

This seemed like the most logical plan in the world, and I was going to do it no matter what.

I always joke that Daniel Craig had come around for dinner.

I was still going through with my plan.

So I got back, I tidied in my apartment, had dinner and wrote a suicide note to my parents.

And I didn't even have an emotion, didn't cry once while I was doing all that.

And that's a very obvious sign that you've become detached from yourself, your true self.

And then at midnight, I sat on the edge of the bed and I took 95Amitriptyline.

And I'm really lucky that I survived.

I kind of done talks to the NHS now, and a lot of them said, you really shouldn't have survived, Liz.

And basically I took the tablets, went to sleep, don't remember anything.

And I woke up two days later in high dependency unit in Basingstoke Hospital and I was incubated.

So that was the worst experience of my life.

I have to say.

You guys all know that from your background, but having a tube down your throat is not fun at all.

But I still didn't know how I'd survived.

I didn't know if a neighbor had called an ambulance or who had found me, if it had been a friend.

And it was only after getting released from hospital about two or three days later, I was reunited with my mobile phone.

And I went through the call log and coming back to what we said earlier, I'd actually called the Samaritans for 13 seconds at 10 to 1, and straight after that, I dialed 911.

And it was that call that saved my life.

And I always say this on a stage.

It's a call I don't remember making.

But it proves that there is a will inside us all that will fight for your life when you need it the most.

That will to survive, that we talk about when people are bleeding out in RTA's at the side of a road.

Something inside you will fight for you when the chips are dying.

And even though I don't remember making those phone calls, they'd saved my life, so I was very lucky.

But I often think maybe that all had to happen to Put me onto this second pathway in life.

I also think maybe I've just got a really good guardian angel up there.

So I'm saying, my friend that died of cancer, her name's Anna, she's grooming with me and often thinks she's there.

It was her up there.

And she went, no, I am having too much fun up here.

You get back down there.

Love you.

You've got more to do.

Not having this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I am very thankful that obviously I did survive.

And I think the message I put out to a lot of people now is, even when you were in that dark, dark headspace like I was, the light does come back in your life.

And I'm so thankful that I survived, you know, and I'm privileged and lucky enough to be able to tell other people that, that I am thankful I survived.

And it's really important people understand that when they're going through that emotion right to the depths of that hole, because you will be okay and you will come out the other side of it.

It just doesn't feel like it right now, but life will get better.

I mean, it is so fascinating, really, like.

Like you were saying.

You're explaining it there.

You're so detached from the emotions in that moment before, but there's still something that wanted to reach out and saved you in that last moment.

So it's.

Yeah, it is a fascinating thing.

And it does come back to that ask twice thing.

You know, I always call it the river of depression.

She woke up that morning, and by the nighttime, that was me.

And I think nobody could have got to me at that point.

You know, I often have people who have lost someone to suicide reach out and ask what could they have done?

And the reality is you couldn't have done anything.

You know, once someone gets to that decision point in life, there's very little you can ever do to.

To reverse that.

But what you can do is if anyone you think is struggling in mental health is just get to them before they get to that point and ask them twice how they are.

Don't let them get away with it.

Yeah.

After that event, what was the aftermath of that like?

Was it a sudden.

Was that, like a shock to you and a sudden realization that things needed to change, or was it still quite a.

A slow journey?

The other side?

It was really weird.

I came out of hospital and I remember seeing the sky and just breaking down in tears and being so thankful.

That I was alive and just thinking, well, that's rock bottom.

And I'm so.

You know, the only way is up from here.

And that was the darkest day and the hardest day of my life.

But it can only get better.

And I was really fooling myself.

You know, I had this overwhelming elation and thought, it's only gonna go up from here.

And that was so not true.

I had a real.

The next couple of months were really tough.

I didn't wanna go on antidepressants.

Cause obviously it was the antidepressants that had caused the overdose.

So I was absolutely staunchly against them.

I went into a massive hole in and around remembrance that year for obvious reasons, and then had other thoughts of sort of, you know, walking out in front of cars and these horrible, destructive thoughts again.

But thankfully this time recognized it and was able to call the gp.

I basically broke down in tears and called the GP again.

And they got me this time, caught me in time.

And that's when they convinced me to kind of go on these antidepressants.

And that was what started to pull me out of the hole.

But there was some really dark days still, and that's okay.

You know, I always use the analogy of surfing.

I can't surf, by the way, but it's the best analogy I can use for people is that I was just falling off that surfboard every day, and I was drowning in the water and spending more time in the water than on the surfboard.

And then I started to get a bit longer on the surfboard, but for no reason at all.

I just.

A big wave would hit me some days and I'd be back in the water again.

And I just got better and better at staying on the board.

And the waves that were knocking me off became less and less often.

And I think so often when I was getting triggered originally or I was going back into the hole, I'd look for reasons why.

I'd be like, well, what have I watched on tv?

What have I not done?

Have I not exercised enough?

Or have I eaten something that's maybe, you know, put me chemically off?

Or who have I spoken to?

What memory have I brought up?

And why am I in this hole again?

The reality is it just happens, you know, sometimes a bigger wave comes off the beach and knocks you over.

And the less you try to pin it on something and look for answers, why or reasons, then the easier is just accept coming back to what we spoke about earlier, like the black dog, you know, just let it come.

Let it knock you off, spend a bit of time in the water and then get back in that surfboard again.

And now I've got a rule that I allow myself two days.

I, if, if I ever hit the hole again.

And it's becoming less and less often these days, but if I hit the hole, I allow myself two days and it's like duvet days.

I allow myself two days to wallow, to rest, to recuperate.

It's like plugging your phone back in.

But on day three, I move.

And wherever that may, you know, that might just mean leaving the house and going for a big long walk or it might mean getting back to the gym.

But that breaking the cycle thing, which is a, it's a go, no go, you know, it's an absolute non negotiable.

Day three, I move now.

And that seems to have broken that cycle where it starts to manifest into four days, five days, a week, and then that's when you start to get in a real.

Because you're sliding down the bank then.

So on day three, I arrest it now.

And it seems to work.

Yeah, that's a really good, like, good suggestion for other people to think about.

And yeah, it's a, it's just interesting to hear because sometimes you hear people who sort of suddenly get this drive in that moment and they turn it around in like what seems like no time at all.

But I think it's really honest to hear that and be like, there are, there was still a lot of ups and downs and a lot of downs and that the surf analogy is great.

It's just that idea that there are things we can control and there are things we can't.

And a lot of the stuff that goes on in our mind we can't necessarily control, but the ones we can, we can.

And it's just important that we look at the situation and go, is there something here that I could have changed?

I could have done, I could have thought about differently.

If not, okay, it's been a bad day, we have one more day and then we move on.

Day three.

And you can't control your thoughts.

You know, your thoughts are your thoughts.

Your thoughts come and go.

It's very difficult to control your thoughts, but you can control your actions, you can control what your feet do.

You are in charge of your feet, you're in charge of your body.

So you can get yourself out the door.

And even if your brain is still going, I want to stay on the sofa, you know, your brain's just making up stuff.

So once you can mentally disconnect from that and go.

Your thoughts, your thoughts really are passing things that come through your brain and they don't control you.

And a lot of the time they're not real.

So once you can mentally disconnect from that and go, but I can do move my feet.

So let's go move my feet.

And that starts to have a good impact.

Or I can control what I put in my mouth, you know, that's still in the gift of my control.

So I think once you can sort of disconnect a bit, it helps.

Yeah.

It's Viktor Frankl's quote from his book Man's Search for Meaning.

He was a Holocaust survivor in the camps for over three years, I think.

And he said, you can take everything away from a man except the one thing that is the true human virtue.

The ability to choose your own mindset in any given situation.

And whilst you can't control what comes in, you can control how you react to how you look at that and how you react to it.

Exactly what you say there.

Yeah, yeah, I love that.

Yeah.

And counseling is hard.

For anyone who's thinking about going through counseling or you know, is on their journey, it's not easy.

You're revisiting some really hard stuff.

So it's going to be hard and you're going to get back into those big back holes.

But it's still better in the end.

It's still a better outcome once you processed all that stuff.

So it is probably one of the hardest journeys you'll ever do, but really worth it at the end.

It's like training for a marathon.

That finish at the end is worth it because you're just a better person.

Yeah.

I just want to jump back into.

Whilst you were working on helicopters, doing that work and some of the work was quite extreme like you said.

Like you're picking up people who are probably having the worst day of their life.

And what was it?

What did you learn from or what did you learn about people from seeing them in the worst moments of their life?

I think I understood the value of love.

I still think you really don't understand true love until you've seen true loss and you've seen a life slip away in front of you.

And once you understand that, your whole perspective on life changes.

But I've seen the best of humanity.

You know, the nurses and doctors that we flew down the back of the aircraft on those missions, you know, we were just flying the aircraft and manning the weapons.

They were the ones doing the life saving on the floor and A lot of them were volunteers from the nhs.

You know, they were not military.

They didn't have to be there, but they came out.

And it's that.

That seed to serve, to make a difference, you know, that's inside us all, that put a uniform on, you know, you put yourself last and put other people first and, you know, just witnessing people who are willing to do that was incredible.

You know, medics running out into the gunfight just to go and grab a casualty and get them back to the ramp.

But I, you know, I think it's very much left its mark on me that.

That true value of love because of the loss and also see that brotherhood that soldiers have for one another.

You know, I've seen soldiers carry their best friends onto an aircraft who have died and set the stretcher down, touch the body and go back into a gunfight.

And just seeing that, that kind of loss in their eyes is something that stayed with me forever, because it's such a strong bond that any kind of war zone or any trauma incident bonds people as well.

And again, I think it's such a strong bond that a lot of those soldiers had built together, been through the hardest days of their lives.

To then lose someone in a gunfight or on an ID is, you know, it's just ripping the heart out of the team.

And, yeah, it's just a huge, much bigger respect, really, for the value of love when you.

When you come back from that situation.

So the things you're explaining there, those experiences of really extreme emotions, human emotions, and you come back and obviously the.

The meth, the way you came back, it was sort of taken away from you early almost in a way that integrating into everyday life after that.

I've heard, I've spoken to many service people who, some have struggled more than others, but what was that like for you, coming back into civilian life?

Oh, God, so hard.

So, like, take away.

Even before I left the military, just coming back from an Afghan debt, you would be in Tesco's 24 hours later and someone would stop their trolley in front of you and want to rip their head off for no reason at all.

Or someone stops at the top of an escalator and you just get so angry so quickly.

And I think it's just you've lost patience.

And weirdly, war is a very simple place to be.

You know, you eat, sleep, fly, repeat for us and go to the gym when you're not busy.

You know, you don't have to think about what to get in the shopping.

You don't think about paying bills, you know, or doing the school run.

It is a very simple life, being at war.

And then suddenly you're back in this busy, busy world where there's traffic and there's people and there's.

You know, it just gets really frustrating.

And that.

That does ebb away.

But I think it's a sign of kind of the.

Probably the tension that we built up while we're away.

But I also had.

I really struggled around remembrance with people who were not paying the correct respects, you know, on the minute silence and things like that, because I'd seen so much loss.

And then I remember in the gym one Sunday, on Remembrance Sunday, and the minute silence came on and people were still moving and knocking around, and I was like, why aren't you standing still?

And you realize that it was a huge thing for me, but it wasn't necessarily so big in their life.

And I think that's another thing I've sort of realized over time about perspective, is the things that really, really matter to me don't necessarily matter to somebody else.

And there might be something in their life that's bigger to them than would be to me.

And we can't all have exactly the same set of values and moral standards.

So I've learned to let that go a lot.

But in terms of when I left the military and integrated into civilian life, I found it really tough.

Just the language we use, you know, military people use this very bespoke language.

I'm sure the firefighter's probably the same.

And it's.

Sometimes you can tell you're sat in a room full of military people because we just spin off on these conversations and all these TLA's about, you know, places we've been and things we've done and sibbies find it very difficult to keep up.

But also, I think maybe being a female as well, you know, one of the best analogies I can use.

I used to go to the hairdressers and the hairdresser would ask me, what do you do for a job?

And I tell them, and there's just this, like, silence because they just didn't know what Ginna Crewman was, and they didn't know how to talk about a war zone or anything like that.

And I'd always gravitate towards lads in pub because I had more to talk about.

There just seemed to be this familiar territory.

And I just think when you're in the tribe of the military or the service family even, you know, the blue light services as a whole, it is your tribe, it's your family, and then civvies just don't get you.

And it's not their fault.

But you know, if you've been picking up dead people all day and you're talking about that, people just go, you've been doing what?

And they make such a big deal out of it.

But we tend to dumb it down and normalize it.

And again, that's a really dangerous place to get to.

I think we're all very guilty of normalizing trauma and danger.

So you'll hear people talking down the pub about this one time I got shot at and when my mate got blown up, I mean, he lost his leg and it's like nothing but because we're exposed to so many traumatic events throughout our lives in the services, whereas civilians might have one big traumatic event in their whole life and that's the one thing they focus on forever, whereas we just get exposed to it normally and we just really start to normalize that in our brain.

So I think most military people probably find the same that when you leave, it's just hard fitting into society again because you're not with the tribe every day, but also just to find that purpose again and backfill that purpose to find a job where you do feel like you're making a difference every day.

And I think that's why so many military and blue light again go into these crazy marathons, carrying a fridge on their back or doing some crazy challenge to raise a load of money for charity because that's what's building their purpose for them.

And you know, if you looked at the cross section of people that hurt themselves at endurance events to raise money for charities, a lot of them are ex service people because they just want to make a difference still.

So they do it in a different way.

Yeah.

Is there anything you think we could do better in terms of helping people integrate back in, or is it as simple as people won't fully understand that experience?

Regardless, I think I actually think the forces do it better than a lot of the other services.

You know, having done lots of talks to the police, I don't know what it's like in the fire section, but, you know, you could give your whole in the area or in the military you serve, you get a bit of resettlement, you're taught how to write a cv, how to get mortgage, all that.

Kind of like it sounds naughty, but it still helps you integrate a little bit.

Really useful.

Yeah, it is.

And it's still a very hard stop at the end, you know, you're in the club on Friday, if you want to go back and see your mates on Monday, you've got to pull in, you've got to get a car pass, you've got to get escorted on to camp.

I worked here for 17 years and I'm being escorted on, but it's still, it's a very hard stop.

Whereas I don't think the police or the fire service get anything.

It's like you could do 35, 40 years to that service and you could give your whole life, maybe your family's lives as well, because you committed to the service and then you're out of the club on the Friday with nothing and expected to survive your own.

And I think what they could do better to answer the question is bring you back a little bit, you know, make you feel like you're still in the family for maybe the first six months, invite you back once to whatever station you worked at or for a station event, maybe then a year later have a check in and just say, look, this functions on, you're still part of the fold.

Would you like to come and take the stabler stabilizers off gradually?

Because from my experience in talking to colleagues, people's experience of leaving has a definite impact on how they reflect on their time and service.

You can have the best life in your service in the world and I know friends who have had the best military career ever, but for some reason or other the squadron didn't organize a leave and do for them or all their mates were away for a leave and do and they never got their squadron print or their mug or whatever it happened to be.

And it's left a very bitter taste on their service life even though it was one small moment.

But it actually has the biggest impact because you just don't think.

I don't think any of us want thanked for our service, but an acknowledgement of our service would be nice.

So to have something that sums it up at the end feels like a really nice ending for it.

And those people who haven't had that feel very robbed at the end.

So I think it's really important for anyone who's still serving.

It's the last thing you can do for someone when they're leaving, especially if they've done a lot of time in, is to rally the troops to give them a good send off or at least make them feel appreciated.

And that actually goes a long way into when that person leaves into civi street of feeling like they've still got value rather than they're just on the scrap heap, which is how a lot of other people felt.

It's a really good idea to sort of stay in touch because it's such a difficult thing when.

When people leave.

Speaking from a fire service background, when people retire after what could have been, yeah, 30, 40 years, like, these are long careers and it's all they've ever known, and then suddenly they.

They leave, they're back home.

And not necessarily that the people at Station aren't reaching out all the time, but you're not seeing each other every day.

And the people at Station still have that same role to do.

They're still just as busy as they always were.

It's not as easy to always put that time in.

And obviously you'll be closer to certain people than others.

And those people may reach out, reach out, but they may feel like, oh, not everyone on the Watch has sort of reached out.

To me, he's checking how I'm enjoying retirement and it sort of spirals.

And the other element of it is identity.

Yes, We.

We make that thing our identity, and we.

It becomes very hard to let go.

Is that.

Is that something that you resonate with?

Totally.

So I was.

One of my lines in my talk is that I thought the uniform defined me.

For my whole career, I thought that uniform defined me.

You know, I'm Liz McConaughey Chinook Ruman, and it took me years of counseling to understand that the uniform you wear does not define you.

You define the uniform.

And until you put that uniform on is just a set of clothes on a shelf in stores.

And you breathe the life, the soul, the banter, the fun personality into that uniform.

And you're still the same person when you leave.

And you can breathe that life, personality, banter into any other role you take forward, whether or not that is being the retired granddad, whether or not it's just being the dad at home who's, you know, or postmark, whatever happens to be when you leave, you're the same person.

The uniform does not define you.

And I think it's really important that people understand that, because we do have a tendency to hang our identity on our jobs.

We're all guilty of it, and it doesn't define you at all.

You're the same person.

And coming back to what you said about, you know, when people leave, forces are pretty good at having quite a lot of associations.

So you have a squadron association, we've got loads of veterans groups, and they make you feel like you're part of a different family.

You've left you join a veterans group.

I'm part of a great group called Veterans can, and they highlight what veterans are capable of.

You know, what the great stories that we've been doing since we left the military.

But I feel like they're in my new family, so I was in a service family, now I'm in this family and that's great.

But for firefighters and police and even nhs, it'd be great to have the same idea where you had, like a station association.

So what you tend to find is when people leave, they join that and then all the people that have left are already in there.

So you almost catch up your old mates who have left a couple of years ago.

And that's what I tend to find, you know, now that I'm out of the squadron, but I'm in the association.

All my mates that left five or 10 years ago before me, I see them at functions now and they have quite good, you know, sort of social network and they do sort of events and things.

So this may be something that the force are doing quite well, that the other blue light services could do well.

Yeah, it's definitely.

It's definitely something to think about.

And yeah, I mean, that.

That question of, like, we.

We always.

It's the question we lead with when we meet someone new is, what do you do?

Like.

Like, it's the most important thing about that person.

And it's.

It's obviously not, but we've just so conditioned.

And the way that I've shaped it before and thought about this is identify, identify versus identity.

Don't make things your identity, but identify yourself as that thing.

So when we make it our whole identity, it becomes very hard to let go of that thing.

It becomes, I am a firefighter.

I am a firefighter.

The day you leave, I'm a retired firefighter, I'm a retired.

And it's like, no, you're.

Whoever you are.

Yeah, like beyond that.

And I spoke to James Elliott on this podcast.

He's.

Do you know James?

Only through socials, but he does very similar things to me.

And he's doing something.

Yeah, really good work.

So he obviously was a paratrooper and he then went on and studied psychology.

And he was saying that rather than using nouns to describe who we are, we need to use adjectives.

Adjectives and verbs.

Things that can be molded.

So things like service, creativity, things that, like service, for example, is my one or one of mine that I would say, because when I was a personal trainer, I was serving people in the gym, I was serving them and helping them on their journey as a firefighter.

It's what I do.

I serve them on the worst day of their life, potentially on the Samaritan's phones.

It's something that you can take through with this podcast.

I'm serving people, hopefully.

Hopefully bringing them a different perspective on what they already know or teaching them something new.

And I think that's such a useful way to look at it.

Totally agree, but we so often don't.

And when you meet people, instead of saying, what do you do?

Say, tell me about you.

Because it opens up.

You know, you're are your mother, father, you've got kids, where do you live?

You know, you just open those slightly different conversations.

So I always like to ask people tell me about you instead of tell me about what you do for a living, because that's really not that interesting, if I'm being honest.

So, yeah, it's trying to get away from a different conversation.

Yeah.

And they may not be.

They may not be proud of what they do.

They might not enjoy it at all, and they might not want to talk about it.

They might be doing it for so many hours that week that it's the last thing they want to talk.

Yeah.

They've come to this.

This party to get away from it, and everyone's just like, oh, what do you do for work?

Yeah.

I also think people have talked themselves down so much these days.

I mean, your inner monologue is your, you know, your harshest critic, but it's the one thing your body listens to the most.

So, you know, picking up flaws in yourself and your appearance or, you know, you can have a really great day, but you focus on that last rep you didn't do in the gym or something like that.

We'd have its tendency to really focus on the last moment of a workout or the, you know, those last failures rather than all the success that went before that.

But also, I meet some people and they go, oh, I'm just a.

And nobody's just to anything.

You know, everyone should be incredibly proud of everything they've got through in life and whether or not that's work stuff, family stuff, whatever.

People have this tendency to play themselves down and really belittle themselves.

And you just think you'd never introduce your friend and go, oh, this is my friend.

She's just a hairdresser.

You never.

But yet people introduce themselves and go, I'm so and so.

I'm just a hairdresser.

So I always think, you know, when you're speaking to yourself or speaking about yourself.

Imagine that you were talking about your best friend because you just wouldn't belittle yourself that way, or you shouldn't belittle yourself that way.

And, you know, there is a very strong link about the vagus nerve, which controls a lot of your emotional center and picking up on those sensory things.

So when you're speaking about yourself, be kind.

Be kind to yourself.

Yeah, yeah.

We're so.

We're so harsh on ourselves.

We are our worst critic.

Oh, absolutely.

With that conversation in mind, if I was to ask you now who you are without needing the RAF to define who you are, what would the answer be?

I am someone who likes to help people.

I am someone who thrives on making other people's lives better.

And hopefully I am showing people that it's possible and the light can come back in your life.

Yeah, spot on, I think.

And what I would also ask you is, again, bearing in mind this whole conversation that we've had and your own journey through everything that you've experienced, what would you say to the person who thinks that they have to get to rock bottom, they have to hit crisis point before they deserve help?

You deserve help right now, and you need to rest the fall.

You know, the further you slide down that hill, the bigger the climb out of the hole.

So everyone deserves help at any stage.

And I think it's probably easier to get help before you get to that crisis point, because if you get to the crisis point, you go into a crisis center, and then you've got to wait on a waiting list before you get a counselor assigned to you.

And all that takes time.

Whereas if you ask for help early, even if you don't think you maybe just need it, get on a waiting list.

Because some of the waiting lists now for a lot of the charities are really long.

And when you start to feel like that you are starting to go one way, if you can already identify that you might maybe need help, you're already on a slope that way.

So getting on a waiting list, by the time you are starting to hit that crisis point, you might just be at the point where hands are ready to reach you and pull you out of the depth.

So I think, you know, nobody ever got any worse from having counseling, let's put it that way.

A problem shared really is a problem halved.

And, you know, there's absolutely nothing wrong with being on a waiting list.

And if the time comes and you don't need it, then somebody else can get your place.

But at least be on the list is my advice.

To people.

Yeah, getting stuff out of your mind, whether that's on paper or in person speaking, it's so valuable because we so often we keep stuff internal and we just dwell on it and it's that spiral that you talk about.

Whereas if you can just write, even if you're writing something down.

Yeah, write something down by yourself.

You know, write letters to people and then rip them up.

Or write letters to people and then just post it without a stamp, you know, it's just going to disappear.

But writing things down, if you've got, you know, things you want to say to people or emotions that need to come out.

Just random little pieces that came out of my mind and are there and they're never going to get read again.

People might never see them.

My book was never intended to be read by anyone.

My book was just a brain dump on their computer and look how much it's helping people now.

So just get out, write it down.

Liz the way I like to finish my episodes is to ask my guests to leave a question for the listener.

So for someone listening who can go away and start a conversation based on maybe what we've spoken about today, it could be a family member, a friend, a stranger, whoever they want to start a conversation with, what question would you give them to start a conversation?

What was your biggest failure in life and what did you learn from it?

Because you always learn more from failure than success.

That's a good question.

That's a strong question.

I like that a lot.

Liz, thank you so much for your time today.

I've really enjoyed this conversation.

If people want to find you online, find the book.

Where can I do that?

Where is it?

I'm pretty much everywhere, Chuck.

Under your sofa.

I might be there.

No, I'm on Instagram as Chinookruck and Twitter, if anyone likes Twitter.

I like Twitter, but not everyone does.

I'm on there as chinookkrujek.

And LinkedIn is Liz McConaughey and Facebook as well as chinookruwchick.

But the book is on Amazon and it's on it's hardback paperback and there's an audiobook as well.

So if people don't want to read these days, which very few people have the time to do, I'm there.

My dulcet tones because I read the audiobook as well.

But yeah.

And if anyone does connect with this, you know, I'd love to hear people's feedback.

I'd love to hear people's.

You know, I do believe a problem shared is a problem have.

So get in touch and share something that you've gone through as well.

Again, thank you so much.

Thank you for a great conversation.

It's been such a.

It's been a really, really good podcast here, a really fun podcast.

So thank you for such great conversations and great questions.

Cheers.

I appreciate that.

From me to the listener, if you have enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone who you think would find some value from it.

And if you haven't already, wherever you're listening or watching, please do follow or subscribe to the show.

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Again, really helps us.

But lastly, for me, thank you for listening.

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