Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick - Making Sense of Men's Mental Health and PTSD? With Kevin Donaldson - Episode 27

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

Have you ever heard of Post Traumatic Success? How did we come to a place where there is such a powerful stigma attached to mental health and men? In this episode we Make Sense of Men's Mental Health and the Post Traumatic Stress associated with being in the line of fire as a Police Officer. Join guest Kevin Donaldson, Co Author of number one best selling true crime book Man You’re Crazy for a story of moving from messed up to blessed that will blow your mind. This Podcast episode is available on Apple and Spotify. Surviving post traumatic stress and multiple suicide attempts, Kevin P. Donaldson found resiliency in the embrace of his trauma. Retiring from the police department in New Jersey in 2014 after being involved in a shooting during a domestic incident, Kevin struggled to find peace inside his own chaotic mind dealing with feelings that were foreign and new while fighting through the difficulties that life threw his way. Kevin now Chronicles his struggles by speaking out and destigmatizing mental health to find resiliency in facing suffering head-on by showing that there is a way to find your smile once again.   Find Kevin's work and dedication to face the truth as the host of The Suffering Podcast. Resources: Books: - Man you’re crazy- https://amzn.to/4c06aIX  Contact Kevin Donaldson: Website - https://www.realkevindonaldson.com  The Suffering Podcast -  https://thesufferingpodcast.com IG - @realkevindonaldson   The Makes Sense Podcast available on Spotify and Apple - You will find a "Follow" button top right. This will enable the podcast software to alert you when a new episode launches each week https://podcasts.apple.com/.../makes-sense.../id1730954168 Click this link to SUBSCRIBE/RATE/REVIEW - https://ratethispodcast.com/makessensepodcast Thank you for your support with our podcast on apple and spotify. Our mission is to remove the blindfolds from the sleepwalking masses and begin the uprising of the sleepwalking masses. OUR SPONSOR: MAKES SENSE ACADEMY Enjoy the show and consider joining our psychological safe haven and environment where you can begin to thrive. The Makes Sense Academy. https://www.riseupwithdragon.com/makes-sense-academy Podcast Episode Highlights 4:30 - How society poses judgment on Police Officers 7:51 - A tough childhood - To have and to have not? 16:53 - The rare opportunity to reinvent yourself 23:47 - Are most police officers ex knuckleheads from their childhood? 31:13 - How did you become a cop? 35:33 - A plane just hit the world trade center! 46:55 - The Day that changed everything - July 10th 2013 57:33 - PTS - POST TRAUMATIC STRESS 1:08:44 - Nowhere to turn. Considering suicide 1:22:03 - Radical Forgiveness and Gratitude   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hmm. Makes sense. A very great morning to you, humans. This is your boy, Dr. J.C., aka. The Dragon. And welcome to a special episode of the Make Sense with Dr. J.C. Dornick podcast. Very, very excited to welcome this gentleman to the podcast. This is Kevin Donaldson. His story very, very much resonates with me. So anybody that knows my story knows about my rise from the dark into the last.

the idea of being messed up and moving on to blessed up. Wait until you hear this story. The focus of this discussion, because we always try to take a topic here and make sense of it, there's very, very many opinions and concepts out there about certain topics like suicide for one of them or corrupt police officers or PTSD and things like that. And those concepts are all based on the programming that we have from our life experience, you know? So whenever we create perceptions and concepts, when we hear a story, they always come from our own version of it that we're, you know, we're looking through our own lens. So that's why I want to take this topic of making sense of men and mental health. And the idea of, like, how can we break free from this culture-created stigma that has a tendency of belittling men?

I mean, I know what it was like for me to grow up for being weak and having problems, you know, I mean, we're just so freaking stubborn, man. So I want to welcome to the Make Sense podcast, the amazing Kevin Donaldson. How are you, my friend? You're JC. You know, I didn't even know you were a doctor for a while. And I have a few credits to go to get my ED. But the reason I don't do it is because I make my kids call me doctor.

That's funny. I would just lead with that one because it automatically gives you credibility. You know, a lot of people ask me what they should call me. Like, there's the dragon. There's JC. There's Dr. J.C. And the whole doctor thing is funny.

if I'm being completely honest, it just probably makes me sound smart and cool. But the truth is, is that I really didn't ever really help people as a doctor. I started helping people once I released from that chain and went out there in the world like you're doing right now, ironically, right? You know, did you help more people as a police officer or now as the you're who you've become? So yeah, you can just, I'll be ecstatic to know that you're just calling. So I like the name of your show, right? You brought up something in the beginning here. Yeah, yeah. Making sense of this whole mental health, post-traumatic stress, things of that.

So making sense is you're trying to bring order out of chaos. Men's mental health, especially when you're immersed in the problem itself, is absolute chaos. Just take a picture with a pen and draw all around that paper and just scribble. And that's what sort of goes on, especially men, because we're stubborn. We're idiots. You know, we can be very tough to persuade when we want to be. It's funny that you brought that up. Because the first thing that I was thinking about is one of the problems that we face is men and that has come from our mother, father, teacher, preacher, and the way we were brought up.

We're going to get into that with your story. If I hear somebody, if I hear a man say, hey, you know, the truth is, is that it's complete chaos and it's hard to make sense of it. There's so many variables. I could easily introduce you to a guy that would tell you exactly what it is. He would say, you know, men's health, that's for a bunch of pussies. Or somebody that says, yeah, we really need to work on that. So the truth is, is that whatever anybody thinks at the time that they think it and say it with an exclamation point at the end, they're right. But it doesn't mean it's right.

You know, so when we look to make sense of things like this topic that we're about to get into, what I like to do for my listeners is not sway them in a direction. Your story is going to move in a direction to where you're at right now and how you're helping. people. I'm not necessarily tethered to the idea that everybody agrees with us, this wherever we get, but I just want them to be exposed to looking at things from all angles. And, you know, this idea of watching the idiot box, as my grandfather would say, and just seeing what news shows you about police officers, just one concept right off the bat that I was going to ask you, but you brought it up. A lot of people would say, like, police officers are all a mess and they're corrupt. And all they do is

beat the crap out of people and all that stuff. But those people never really take the time to say, I wonder why they're like that. Every one of us, and I'm talking every single one of us, and I will say this with an exclamation point. Whatever tribe, group, ethnicity, whatever you belong to, you're going to be judged by your lowest common denominator. And the vast majority of, you know what, everybody with glasses is a nerd. Well, everybody with glasses is a nerd, right? That's because the person who said that knows one person with glasses who's a nerd. When people say cops are bad, it kind of makes my blood boil in it. It takes away from all the good that people do.

I know a lot of cops throughout my career and post career. Actually, I know more cops, my post career. And I will tell you, with 100% certainty, 99.99% of them are good people. Do we have our boneheads? 100%, but in the doctor field, there are some bonehead doctors. Yeah, I do God's work, who save lives, who are so committed to their craft. And when a police officer goes bad or gets caught for going bad, it infuriates nobody in the world more than the other police. Because all the causes put a pockmark on us and the work that we're trying to accomplish.

So I don't get mad at people when they say that. I understand that it comes from ignorance. But the great thing about ignorance is it can be edging. So I have this thing, right? I abhor laziness. You know, I just abhor it because it's, that's a virus, you know, and that's a, if you don't, if you don't cut that cancer out in the beginning, it will grow. A lot of people will say, you know, people who are ignorant. Well, ignorance can be educated. We can take our experiences. I have many people in my life who grew up in a, in an urban neighborhood. And they say, yeah, well, we had a view

of cops that wasn't very favorable. And then I met you and not all cops are like that. And I said, well, this one particular person is Puerto Rican. I said, well, how would you like it if I said that that all Puerto Ricans were this type of person? You know that's not true. Okay. And guess what? Those people who say those things, they also know that's not true. But their eyes are just focused on the one bad apple that seems to get the most attention. When the cops out there who are working day after day after day doing great work, they never get highlighted because it's not newsworthy. The idiot box is not telling us what to think. That's right. At the risk of getting completely off topic and having to do two episodes. The actual science behind what you're talking about

is, you know, this phenomenon of people labeling something, even if they inherently know that there's another side and it's not true. It's forgive you for, you know, not what you do. That's just the way the brain works. We have this thing called cognitive bias. You see this in politics and religion right now, where people just completely have the ability to shut out anything otherwise than what they've been raised to think and then only hang out with the right people and the things that validate what they think. So what an interesting way to start this conversation because everybody's like, okay, we got a fired up cop here. You know, we're going to bring you all the way from where you've been to where you're out right now, where you're, you know, you've just authored this

amazing book, man, are you crazy? And we'll get into that in the latter part. But I'm always fascinated how people like synchronistically find their way to meeting people and find their way careers. And I've heard bits and pieces of this story. So take us back to your childhood, where you grew up and what that life was like. You know, what kind of a childhood and upbringing did you have? I grew up very humbly. Most people would call it poor. I prefer to repurpose it and call it humble. But it, things never resonated with me very well. My surroundings were so chaos. You talk about making order out of chaos. My surroundings were so chaotic. I watched certain people in the Atlantic City area in New Jersey. I watched certain people have, and I watched a lot of people

have not. I was one of the have-nots, but I watched how the people of the day, the haves, got what they got. And these were, these were gangsters. So I grew up in the era of the true corrupt Atlantic City, the Scarfo era. I watched them, we knew who they were. Listen, they were normal guys. They were fathers. You know, we played baseball against their kids. We were friends with their kids. We knew who they were. We sort of just, they were just normal. people, you know, they were just, they were just people trying to make a living. It wasn't any big deal, but we knew how they got what they got. So being a have not, if you grew up around me and you didn't nail it down, I was stealing it. I was going to take it from you. I had stolen everything from

candy, you know, when I was a kid, the big thing was stealing condoms, why I was like 10 years old. I wasn't going to use them. But I would still condoms because I thought it was cool. Candy, and then I graduated to much larger items. I think the, largest item I ever took was out of a pre-construction house. There was a hot tub in there. And we wiggled this hot tub out, threw it in the back of the truck, drove down the road with a hot tub. Now, again, there was no purpose behind it. What were we doing? We're not going to sell it. We're not going to use it. We have no plumbing to hook it up. We just wanted to feel that win, you know, feel that good feeling because we were all missing something at home. I was really missing

something. I grew up around a monster who, you know, we talk about, you know, how you grew up, and your views of how you grew up. Well, I grew up in an incredibly racist household. People of any other skin color other than white were not looked at very favor. One of the things I always say that my father used to call me the laziest white man alive. And I never understood that. Like, God, that one got me because I say, okay, well, I guess, you know, I'm a young kid. I really don't know the world.

I guess people of all different ethnicities are just lazy. You know, they're just lazy people and white people aren't lazy. But see, here's the problem. And this comes with every walk of life. As you grow up and you start to see the hypocrisy in those words that were drilled into you as a kid, even basic racism. You know, black people are bad, white people are good. You'll start seeing that hypocrisy. Well, you know what, I know a lot of white people that are really bad.

And I know a lot of black people that are really good. So you start to question. And when you question one thing, when you see the falsehoods in those statements, now of a sudden, you start questioning everything they say. even the stuff that they say that's that's legitimate so that's kind of what i did and you know by the time i was 14 years old i wasn't listening to anything right because i thought stuff that that was coming out of his mouth was just was absolute nonsense you know there was there was an incident and it bleeds out in children it bleeds out in in their everyday life and it's funny because i just reconnected with this guy i went to high school with this guy he's black guy and i

remember i remember calling him the n-word right right in the open air of school and his name's Leo, so I won't say his last name. And I remember to look on his face. I remember to look on his face and it got me. It really hit home with, and I kind of slump my shoulders, put my head down, and I always felt really bad about it. Come full circle because Leo just contacted me and he's working on a project and he's watching what I'm doing. So who was the bad guy in that situation? I was the bad guy. I was turning into the same monster that I was growing up with. And, And watching these guys are watching these gangsters, I was turning into them. So where's that going to end you?

It's going to end you in jail or it's going to end you dead or it's going to end you in some sort of trouble, but it's definitely not going in a direction that's going to bring any any type of good production. You know, throughout my younger years, I was constantly looking for an identity. You know, I was constantly trying to find my place in this world. I was a fat kid. No, I wasn't Husky. I was fat.

And I knew we had something in common. I graduated high school at 325 pounds. Now, you met me in person. I'm like 6'4. I graduated high school at 325 pounds, and that was not muscle. I looked like there was a picture of me and my grandfather standing next to each other. I look like I'm going to cover them in chocolate and eat them. I was in high school, football was my thing.

But I was about 265. I was known as an owl OWL, which stood for overweight lover. Because I was good looking enough. to get away with that weight. Yeah, I wasn't. I wasn't. So, you know, I didn't, I couldn't be the ladies man because I just, I didn't fit that bill. I was, I was a good enough athlete to where I could eke my way through and, and sort of hide behind that. Thankfully, I never did work in school, but thankfully, I was intelligent enough to try to get past classes. Like, I always figured out some sort of scam on a lot of things. Like, I hated biology, right? We had this, this, I went to a

Catholic school. That's kind of probably something you picked up. from the streets when you were just looking to get the hell out of the house and stealing and stuff like that. This is what's interesting about that. If you can, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I just want to just state something that's very relevant to this show is this idea. We're always talking about this programming. Like, you know, the idea that very often our perception and the way we interact with

life and respond is not really our idea. It's, it's inherent. What I was hearing you say is you, you had the ability to identify some things like what was going on with your dad as things that were. nonsense that you were like, I don't want anything to do with this and then move away from it, but it still had an impact. It was wired in and it put you on alert. So it's just interesting to see kids going through high school because I was like that too. I've got my own story, but I was always looking to get away with something and cut corners and run a scam on something

too. But that wasn't really my idea. That was just my program. That was the way I was. You know, I just, I found the easy way out. Yeah. And we all know how the easy way out ends. It never ends productive. The hard stuff, the reason that stuff is difficult to attain is because it's hard to obtain. They said that the longest trip between point A and point B is a shortcut. No, absolutely.

There are no shortcuts in life. You know, and I didn't, I didn't find that out until later. You know, I was telling you about biology. And Sister Mary Dominic was, I know she was a big Notre Dame football fan. So instead of going home and doing my biology homework, I went home and watched Notre Dame football. And I would come in on Monday morning, hey, sister, did you see this one? And did you see this one? And I'm telling you right now, Jacey, I didn't do a damn thing all year in biology.

And I got to be. Yeah, you got to be. Okay. So, yes, I had the street smarts. I did have the intellectual smarts as well. I did have the book smarts. So I was able to eke my way through, but I'm still trying to find my way in this world. I was a tough kid.

I got into a lot of fights, but that was a lot of my programming from home. You know, I grew up in a very, very abusive household. And I sort of picked on the kid who I saw as less because I was taking out my aggression. One of the guys I've recently reconnected with, and he's become a very dear friend of mine, I bullied the hell out of this kid. And then he left school, and I always felt bad about it. But what it did was it transformed my way of thinking to always, he's trying to protect the underdog. And it happened very shortly after he left school. Took

me 30 years to track that guy down. And with the advent of social media, I was able to get it. I'll say his name because I love him dearly. His name's Jesus Aponte. Do you know how many Jesus Apontes there are in the world? Right. There's a pun. Yeah. So I track him down. Turns out he's a cop. Oh, wow. And this guy, I call him on the phone for the first time. I was like, Jay, everybody called him Jay. Like Jay, I'm really sorry. And he says, hey, listen, man, we were just kids, I forgive you. And I'm like, you son of them. Can't you just like yell at me, call me names, do something to make me feel good. But no, this guy had the grace to forgive me. So here's how stupid I was. Jay is now one of my very good friends. I wasted a 40-year relationship.

This is somebody who I should have been close to, but I do break those generational curses. And I tell my kids that story about what a jerk their father was. I have to show that vulnerability to them. So they don't fall into the same trap that I. fall into you know they they grow up they've grown up much much differently than than I have I'm constantly as a child looking for my identity trying to find my place in this world you know I was I was smart I was somewhat athletic you know I was tough I had some street smarts but nothing ever really worked nothing ever really fit but I will tell you this the first opportunity that I had to get out of the house I tailed it two hours away from my house to college

thankfully I was smart enough to get into college play football I had the opportunity, and it's a rare opportunity, is to try to reinvent myself. You know, when I went away to college, I went from chaos to being able to control the order in my life. Started doing my own laundry, making sure everything was folded and put it away, making sure my bed was made. Most kids go the opposite direction in college. They're order, order, and now all of a sudden they have the opportunity for chaos.

I reversed that. And my life started to change. Now, instead of going out and being this true jerk, I started to start walking a different path but there's backslides right um i had a lot of injuries in football program is still running yes yes so for a short time things were going well hey listen got some girlfriends and and all that stuff because i lost a lot of weight i started getting i started hitting a gym more and i was always in the gym but it was it was a different type of lifting i was doing power lifting i started getting into boxing. I started getting into all sorts of different things, just still trying to

navigate this, this weird world. And with my injuries in football, you know, I think the last one that ended it was I tore my groin muscle that needed surgery. There will never be a more humiliating experience than having a bunch of Jamaican nurses who you can't understand what they say working on your groin. And, and then I backslid. Then I, then I started, you know, I couldn't be in the gym as much. I just started going down that, that bad road again. Let me ask you a question about that because if you look at your pattern, did you start to develop the perception that you were a victim? Like, you know, because there's a lot of people out there that keep trying and they go on a run and then they backslip, which as we know now, you know, if you're conscious, you know that the obstacle is away and failing is part of learning and stuff. But when it's happening, did you start to perceive that you're getting a bad shake at life between your dad and all of these things?

You start to develop a why me type attitude. Why me? Why am I going through all this stuff? You know, why is this stuff happen to me? Can't you just let me be happy for once, whoever's in control of your life? I'll tell you the one thing that I did lose in college when I started to really backslide is I lost my faith.

I told, believe it or not, as bad as I was, I still found a little bit of value in faith. And then I took a class, Bible is literature, by a guy named Dr. John Becker. And when you read the Bible as a book, it is ultra-violent. It is, it is, you know, it is brutal. Like, there's no God here. There's nothing here.

So I just erased my faith. It's like it didn't exist. And then I had, you know, because that always kept me somewhat grounded. You know, that fear, fear is the mother of morality type of thing. As bad as it God, it always sort of drew back to it a little bit. But now with no faith, God, the fetters were off. I was free to do with whatever I wanted to do. Yeah, fuck it.

Yeah, I did. You know, I was that guy at the parties who would drink, especially if there was no girls at the party. I would drink until I got obliterated. And then I would go out and do something stupid. I think one time I was January. And one of the guys I was rooming with had a chavet, those little cars, and it was freezing cold outside.

And I was getting sick. So I was rolling down the window and the window wouldn't roll down. So all I did was just punched the window out. And then once we got to the parking lot, I walked over a snowbank. I walked over a car. Public safety sees me. They go chasing me. I run up to my room.

As I'm running up to my room, I'm taking off clothes. So they knock on the door and here I come out, sleepy-eyed with no clothes on. They're like, did you see somebody run up here? I'm like, I've been up here sleeping all night. I don't know what you're talking about. And that sort of continued. I got out of college. I switched my major to literature, and I got out of college, so I figured, okay, I'm not going to be a pastor or a priest or anything or change my life that way. So,

you know what, maybe I can teach kids because I did have a love. I still have a love for literature, and I always will have a love for literature. And, you know, towards the end of my college career, I sort of got it back together once again, where I sort of looking at my future a little bit closer. Unfortunately, that came at a cost because I got thrown off campus for, there was multiple things, but I think the thing that threw me off campus is we were out one day. And you know, there's big wooden spools. Well, I went to school at Fairleigh Dickinson University, which is very hilly in New Jersey, in Battison. How old are you?

I'm 49. A little bit older. A good friend of mine who would be 52 was a big football player there. So he's a little bit older than you. His name was Anthony Shabona. Oh, Boner. I know Boner really well. Big guy.

I went to high school with him. Oh, my God. Boner scored, picked up a fumble at the five-yard line. Oh, yeah, I know all about it. He was a great guy. I mean, fantastic. Very successful guy. I talked to him occasionally through Facebook, but that's about it.

Oh, that's awesome. So I picked up one of these big wooden spools, and I thought it would be funny to see how far I can roll it down a hill. Well, I roll it down the hill, and here comes a public safety van, and it hits the side of the public safety day. I go running. I get away, but the people I was with did not. They told on me, and they were like, well, you can stay in school,

but you can no longer live on campus. You can't go. There was like a line. You couldn't go past this line. So I get an apartment. But it forced me, it opened my eyes a little bit. Open my eyes to say, hey, you know what? The stupid shit you did when you were a little kid, there's some real consequences to it now.

You know, so I had to I had to own up to it and struggle and get my own apartment, get a job, and then work a job while I waited tables, while I continued my schooling because I wasn't going to give up on that. It's the only thing I had left. It was the only form of stability I had in my life. life. But somehow I made it work. And I graduated. I went to graduate school and I started teaching high school. I started teaching high school English. I didn't know that. Yeah, I started teaching I taught. The biggest lesson I ever taught was make sure your door in teaching was make sure your directions are very concise. So we were reading the marriage of heaven and hell by William Blake. And in the

marriage of heaven and hell, there's something called the Proverbs of Hell. It's little pieces of advice that were written 500 years ago that would be applicable to today like the cutworm forgives the plow the busy bee has no time for sorrow so those those little things and I had these two seniors in the back and I give this I give this assignment out and it says you know if you could write a piece of advice that would be valid 400 years in the future what do you think it would be most people did their best but it's a tall order I was a brand new teacher it's a tall order for high school seniors I have one kid in the back say if you shake more than twice you're playing with yourself And the other one wrote, if you play with it, you'll go blind.

They followed the rules. That's funny. Yeah, now, I'm 22 years old, and I'm looking at them. I'm like, it's funny guys. But let me ask you a question. Just an interesting irony here. And I have a lot of friends that I went to high school with and grew up with that became police officers.

And I got to tell you, for the most part, they were the biggest knuckleheads I knew. You know, here we are hearing this story. And I'm like, I'm wondering, did the kids in the class when you're a team? you know, you were running away from cops and throwing spools at people and getting so drunk you'd black out. It's just interesting because on the other end of that, the reason why you serve so well right now and probably were such a good police officers because of that. But is there a correlation? I mean, you have that experience on the police force because we're going to go there about how that all started. Is there a correlation between that? Like, is that typical that police officers? had some sort of a rough or crazy childhood? Because that's what my perception is. The character, and this was recently put to me by a woman named Stephanie Samuels, who's a leading clinician, therapist, works at the brain bank in Boston, a real big in the Concussion Legacy Foundation. Here's the profile of a cop. Somebody who comes from an awful childhood, born in chaos,

lived in chaos, doesn't know how to live without chaos, creates their own chaos, comes from some sort of abuse, either physical, emotional, or sexual, involved in some sort of, to contact sports, really good at taking care of others, really bad at taking care of themselves. And the first time I spoke with Stephanie, she told me this. And I said, and I called my buddy up who introduced me to her and I said, hey, Mike, did you tell Stephanie anything about me? He goes, no, no, I just told her this is the guy you want to talk to. And I said, because she pegged me. That's funny. And guess what? I know a lot of police officers who are that same way. What do you think about that? Because right now, before we, you know, people don't know you yet, right?

And we're going to get into that part of the story right now because, you know, Kevin is just this guy that is just blessing so many people. He's actually on a trajectory right now to like make a massive impact on the world in a positive way. But we're still back here right now. So what is your opinion? I mean, you have a you have your own vantage point because you actually were a police officer. But what is your opinion of like this idea of like knowing that for the most part, these police officers technically according to Steph, New Samuels were kind of nuts. Because there's angels all around us.

It's whether we choose to see them. Now, as bad as I was as a kid, don't ever think that I never ran in face-to-face with a cop. But I will inevitably tell you that there was two ways. When I was a kid, there was two ways. It's either you're going to get not beaten, not hurt, but you're going to get smacked around by a cop or you're going to get taken home to your parents. Back in the day where that was okay. I'd rather take the smack from the cop.

And then there's some jerk cops who would smack you and then take you home to your parents who you double beating. But most cops have had that experience with another cop. And it changed their views and it changed their life to the point where if I get caught, it could go one of two ways. It could go really bad or I could take a little bit of street or curb justice. I've had that. I've had that where, you know, some cop, as a police officer, all they want to do, most cops, all they want to do is just make an impact on somebody's life. Those cops that catch those future cops and let them go, it makes an impact on them. They're like, yeah, you know what? That's the guy I want to be like.

like, I want to be like that, you know, because kids are going to be kids. Kids are going to get in trouble. They're going to do stupid things. That's what being a kid is about. They're sort of finding their own way. But the cop who gives that kid grace and allows him to live another day, the impact that that makes on future cops or people who are thinking about going into law enforcement, they're the best cops. I would just go ahead and say that the stigma that most kids would have is that cops get off on giving people a hard time. Some do. Right? Some do. So that goes back to what you were saying before is like there's nobody that

hates that cop that gets off on fucking with people than another police officer. Having this conversation with somebody else before you move on this. Yeah, yeah. Having this conversation. So yes, there are cops who were shoved in lockers in high school who as soon as they get the power. They abuse the power. Wow. But the real cops on the force, the real cops on the force identify those people really well.

And there were higher ranking officers that who were. I saw abusing power, and I would call him out, and I would say the most awful things to that. And there's not much else they could say, because if they say anything back to me, I'm going to go, well, or I get in trouble for anything, I'll say, hey, he was abusing his power. I was stopping him from abusing his power. And now they get in trouble. So they're not, it's a chess move. You know, it's, I have them blocked.

Check me. Don't do nothing stupid in front of me. That's what makes a good cop. A good cop is somebody who knows that yin and yang, who knows that good and bad. because if you were, if all you knew in your life was sunshine and rainbows and you only knew the good stuff, how are you going to deal with somebody whose life is born in chaos? Sounds like it's pretty tough to be a good cop. It's not as hard as you think.

It's really not. You'd have to be level-headed. Body cameras are making that a little tougher. They're good and they're bad. They're good because they protect you. They always, I never worked with a body camera. We worked with what was called an MVR, a mobile video recorder, which was in the cars.

I was there when they first came in and everybody was scared. Oh, my God, I'm going to get in trouble. That mobile video recorder protected me against false accusations every single time it never once jammed me up. So knowing that going in, you know, I never wanted to become a cop. It was the furthest thing from my mind. My brother took test after test after test after test. And I think I took, I applied for the New Jersey State Troopers in 99 on a whim because he said, hey, let's let's apply for this.

So, okay, I apply for it. I never was arrested. I don't even have a parking ticket. and I didn't fit their criteria. That's the letter I got. I got the letter in my house somewhere. And I was like, you know, it was no big deal. I was like, oh, okay, you know, no big deal.

So I just sort of shifted around job to job. So cars. As I thought the story was that you got accepted or you passed your test right away. But what you're saying is you had prior at an earlier time, you just kind of waved it off. Did that kind of, do you remember that moment as like saying, I guess this is not what I'm supposed to do? I never took it seriously. So when I was rejected, it was no big deal. The thought of being a police officer, because of my past, I'm like, you know, I don't really fit this bill.

I was a fan. You expected not to get it. Yeah. You know, so it wasn't, it wasn't anything. When they said I wasn't even eligible to take the test because I didn't fit their criteria, I was like, all right, you know, I didn't take this all that seriously anyway. And I just sort of navigating life, you know, I did whatever I had to do. You're a survivor. I mean, one thing to point out here, people listening to this story, I don't know what your reality is like at home.

But like, this is a guy that didn't have any backup plan or support. I mean, like, you're on your own from a young age. 17. Yeah. I mean, I left the house and that was it. That being said, you know, I mean, you should be pretty proud of yourself, including the rolling down the hill of the spool. I mean, like, you're doing everything on your own. A lot of people know that when they screw up, they can just go, they can, they can,

fall back on somebody. How did you full circle come back to it? Because I mean like your life right now is completely defined by, you know, some of these traumatic events that happened and we'll get into that. But like, what brought you back to it? I got a job selling software to private clubs moving coast to coast. So I got to see this country. And I got to see this beautiful country that we live in. And most people don't ever get out of their own little microcosm. They're stuck inside their own house. own four walls for most of their life. I think the saddest thing is to never go outside of your town. And I know there's lots of people who do it. Because this country we live in is filled with such great things, such great diversity. The first time I was ever on an airplane, I jumped out of it.

First time I ever was on an airplane. Second time I was on an airplane, I went to Wisconsin. And I drove from this Wisconsin. I was working. I drove from Wisconsin out through Minnesota into the Dakota's and I see my first herd of buffalo and the beauty and the majesty of this great plains and these just huge beasts. It was my eyes just became so wide and I think I sat there watching there. There was a small herd of buffalo. I'm not I'm not dances with wolves, John Dunbar. I am, we're talking about maybe 50 to 100 buffalo and I'm just sitting there watching these things just roam around and and you still see there's still places. There's trails marked throughout the Midwest throughout the Great Plains where these Buffalo used to stampede and just did the concave,

they changed the topography of the whole planes. And it just widened my view, but here was the problem. I was 23 years old, 24 years old, something like that. And I'm traveling, no, I was 24. I'm traveling coast to coast. And it's great for about the first six months. But living out of a suitcase, you understand why comedians and people who live on the road, become alcoholics because it's very lonely. There is no home base. You're sitting in your hotel room

or what are you doing? You're at the bar. You're at the bar. You're drinking. So it's very easy to slide back into that stuff. For the brief times that I was home, I was getting back into shape. You know, I was I was trying to do the right thing. And I'm in the gym one day. And I would always train with this guy. And I didn't know him. I didn't know who he was. I didn't know what he did. He just trained really hard. He was an older guy. He was in his 50s at the time, which is fun. because it seems old to me now or it was old back then he was an old man right in your early 20s and he uh and he was working out with this guy and the guy says uh we're just talking and he ever thought of becoming a cop and i was like yeah you know i took this i applied for the state police years ago but

i didn't take it that seriously it's not that not really my dream and he goes well i'm the chief of police and we're hiring and uh i think he'd be good for it and that's that's how it happened and in new jersey it's very rare because police work in New Jersey is extremely competitive because the pay's the pay scale is so high. So I said, you know, I'm tired of traveling. Sold a good product. Hey, you get a pension, you get medical benefits, you know, it was a small town. Seems like a good deal. All right, I'll take the test. Again, not taking it too seriously. It was a basic IQ test. All right? And I did, I did very well. And I think I got in 98 and I was mad because I knew what I got wrong and I knew it. Sure enough, I get hired. I get hired in June. of 2001. And I'm like, I'm ready to go. You know, I'm like, all right, let's, uh, this,

this is just my next venture in life until I backslide or screw it up or, you know, I, I, but I took it very seriously. I took it as, but I was so new. I was so fresh. And I, I remember asking a lieutenant saying, hey, if I pull a car over and I get a, I get one of the PBA cards and one of the union cards, what do I do? Like, I didn't even know. And he's like, yeah, you know, you let him some, you give them some courtesy and it's like all right you know so i went into the police academy in on august third of 2001 and police academy was a big wake-up call but it fit me because all of a sudden i have something that i never had in my life i have structure i have discipline i have a goal and i fit like i fit like one of those square pegs and i loved it i absolutely loved it

And because I was, I was 26 when I got hired. So I was, I was a little bit older than everybody else. They made me a squad leader. So I was in command of people. And I, I just took to it like a fish in water. And then while we're sitting in the academy one day, early September, our captain comes in and says, plane just hit the World Trade Center. No big deal.

I'm telling you right now, being in the New York metropolitan area for as long as I had lived in this area, that happened all the time. Small planes always hit those big buildings. So we didn't think anything of it. But when it hit the World Trade Center, I remember I'm sitting next to a woman. She was a transit cop. And I remember a look on her face, like a concerned look because her father worked in the World Trade Center at Canter Fitzgerald. But she wasn't overly concerned.

20 minutes later, we go back to instruction. Captain comes in again. He says, another plane just hit the World Trade Center. Now all of a sudden, the atmosphere changes. You could drop a pin. We're starved for information. The woman to my right is ultra-concern now because her father, is there. The chaos ensues. You know, we get recalled to our department. And we're a month into

the police academy. We're not trained on much. I go into my department and you got to remember, this is how, this is how weird it was at that time, because we didn't know what was going on. We didn't know whether we were fully under attack. I think a plane had just, by the time I got back to my apartment, or to my department, and the way I was driving, I could see the New York skyline, so I could see the towers burn and plane had hit the Pentagon. And I think they were tracking a bunch of other planes that were in the air. So lieutenant takes me upstairs to the armory and says, and gives me my gun. And he says, okay, just don't shoot anybody. Gives me my ammunition. I'm not qualified to carry a gun, but we're thinking it's war. It's go time. It's, it's time, you know,

whether you're trained or not, you're more capable than the average citizen off the street. So here you go. And I went out and stood post because we had some high value targets or what they perceived as high value targets. We had a, one of the companies, like 75% of the world's paycheck. So if that was destroyed, it would have shut down the economy. So we were out there. We were just looking for stuff. And I remember the looks on people's faces. The looks on people's faces were just blank and confused and starved for information. Little did they know. We didn't know anything either. But I remember they're coming up like, hey, did you hear anything? And we're like, no, we don't have any information. There's not any information coming out in New York.

But that day, police work was defined for me. Police work is when people don't know where to go, they're going to go to the police. And they're going to expect you to have some sort of calm semblance about you. And they're going to, even if you don't have the answers, they're looking to you to just be a voice of reason and authority. That's so interesting because, I mean, I have my run-ins with cops as, you know, as an idiot kid. But for the most part, that's the way I viewed police officers. When you're in trouble, go find a cop, right?

And it's interesting to see, you know, how like society is like, you know, it's just, I don't even want to get into all these things that just pissed me off. But it's nice to be reminded of that. And by the way, when that first plane hit the world train center, Dragon was right near Trinity Church. Wow. Yeah. So I was right there. I was one of those people running from the smoke. Yeah.

But, you know, thankfully, there were people who ran towards it. Yeah. I remember them driving past me and I said, oh, boy, I never saw them again. So there's two types of people in this world. Yeah. There's those that run towards the danger and those that runs away from the danger. And guess what? In police work, that's no different. There are police officers that run away and there are police officers that run towards.

So it's just a different sector of population. That day, it changed my views forever and it sort of solidified what I was meant to do. All of a sudden, now I find my identity, that identity as a youth that I was looking for so vehemently and so fervently. I found it now in being this voice of reason when people don't know what to do and people are lost. Well, go find a cop. So we go back to the Police Academy. You know, police work sort of changed after that. Graduate, I hit the streets. My first day on the street, you're coupled with a veteran officer. I can still remember the address. It's respond to number 23 for elderly female who.

is unresponsive. I walk into this house. Now, the only dead bodies I had seen at this point was in a funeral home. They were very rare because I was very shielded from that stuff. And here's this woman in a powder room of a townhouse. And those are people who know the powder rooms, the downstairs powder rooms of a townhouse are extraordinarily small. Well, she was in front of the toilet, which, in a spot about that big, praying as if a Muslim was praying. It's not a position that an 83-year-old woman gets into. Right. And I'll never forget.

And the guy was standing on the other side of her and he's a very good friend of mine and my mentor. A guy's named Steve Sarjase. He's standing with his elbows up against the wall. That's how small this place was. And he looks at me and goes, well, we've got to do something. We pull her out, get her on her back and now I'm fresh out of the academy. So all the training is very fresh in my mind.

But she was so, she was in such bad shape that when I put the bag valve mask on her, I had to pull her real teeth out. So choke on them. You know, you bear the chest, and we're not talking about Farrah Fawcett bearing the chest. This is not something you really want to see. We go to work on her. Unfortunately, she doesn't make it. And I see another portion of police work.

I see her family members coming in as they're putting her on the stretcher. She's in the bag. And I see the look on their face. And they're looking for answers. So they're coming to us and saying, what's going on? You know, you're again, people are lost and they're looking. for you. Now all of a sudden, this dead body in front of me, which I see as a dead body, I'm not seeing that as somebody that used to be human. I've separated myself from that.

I'm starting to see, it's starting to be drawn back that this was a human. People cared about this person. People loved this person. People checked on this person every day. And this person is no more. And you were there at the final moments. The next day, here's another portion of police work. There's a robbery at gunpoint out of a neighboring town. Me and my field training officer, catch him. Catch, there was two guys. And this is back in the day when glove boxes could magically open. It's amazing. They just pop right open. Well, this glove box magically opens and there's a gun. They were stealing TVs out of Best Buy or something like that. And then I'm looking, I'm like, oh, shit, this just got real. Yeah, that was that first time you said, oh, that's right. Somebody

could hurt me. Yeah. Yeah. So they're not, so now I'm just getting all of this training in such an abbreviated time. And this is, again, this is a small suburban service-oriented town. This is not an urban environment where you're going to call to call to call. But in an abbreviated time, I'm starting to see these things. And then there's police chases because we were, I worked in Roseland, New Jersey, and we were 10 minutes away from Newark, connected by a major artery highway. So they would come into the wealthier areas, steal cars, and go back down to Newark. So you get your fair share of police chases. And the first time you've had a car going up to 120 or 130 miles an hour, and you're watching that car shake and you're smelling all the engine burning. And when it's

over, the adrenaline dump that you have, you're thinking, well, if I went to hit a pothold doing 130, I'm done. I'm done. But you just brush it off because you got to go to the next call. And that's how life went. But most, the most, and people ask me this to this day, like, what's the most memorable call. And I've said this so many times because it sticks in my head and I wish I could find this young man. We go to a emotionally disturbed female and she, she's about ready to end her life. She got a knife with her. Her four-year-old child is sitting next to her and we walk into this situation where we don't know what's going on. And there's this woman. We're trying to talk to her. Now, we're taught that you never go at the time, I believe it was the 25-foot rule. You never go within

25 foot of somebody with a knife because that's how long it's going to take for you to draw your weapon and fire back at her. This woman needed help. So I sat next to this woman. I ignored that 25 foot rule. I did not see her really as a threat, but I shouldn't have gotten that close. And I just talked to her. Talk to her like a human being. At first, her child whose name was Mason, was sort of sidled up to her. Like you wouldn't leave her side. And here I am. I'm sitting there and this is back in the day before police officers wore BDUs, battle dress uniforms. They look a little bit more rugged now. We were crisp, clean, ironed, collar brass was shined.

And he's just looking at everything. And you can see as you can see. And as he's getting more curious and more adventurous, he's coming closer. And he's touching my radio. And he's, he's, you know, he's pointing to stuff. And like, what's that? And then as time moved on, the kids started getting closer and closer and closer. And we were able to talk the woman out, get the kid out to safety,

go spend time with his grandmother. Fast forward 10 years. And you leave the call, you're not thinking anything of it. You're like, okay, well, it was just, it was a good job. Fast forward 10 years later, I'm in the supermarket, and I hear this voice calling me from behind. I'm in civilian clothes. And they say, hey, Officer Kevin, Officer Kevin, and I turn around.

I go, yeah, like, is your name Kevin? I'm like, yeah, yeah. Just, well, I'm Mason. And a long time ago, you helped out my mom, and she's doing really good now. And that's because of you. All of a sudden, you're just like, you, you know, there's, there's times in your life when you become, you hit that, that skew in the road, that, that fork in the road. And you get a little, you get a little, uh, sidetracked from your mission. And then things like Mason just realign you.

And that's the most memorable call I have. And it's not, I've arrested plenty of people. I've sob rob, I've done, I've done almost everything in police work. But that's the call that I remember. Let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsor. The Make Sense podcast is sponsored by the Make Sense Academy, co-created by both myself, Meeker, aka The Chicken, and The Dragon, the Make Sense Academy is a live interactive community where like-minded, solution-focused, curious seekers of expansion, gather daily in a mastermind setting

with both Chicken and Dragon, where they have access to premium content, online courses, and powerful collaboration and networking, all for total. $24 a month. The Make Sense Academy and its members are solely responsible for funding the Make Sense podcast. So feel free to reach out to us at www.Rise Up With Dragon.com and check out the Make Sense Academy, risk-free, with a money-back guarantee. Now, back to the Make Sense podcast. So, wow, you know, I remember hearing the first time you told me about that story. So I would assume that, you know, that was probably a moment where, you know, you were talking about always finding your identity. It's one thing to find your identity, but, you know, it's like another for,

to feel like I'm doing the right thing and I'm useful. This is what I'm supposed to do. What I know about you, and this is how I met you, because I'm meeting you on the other side of all these stories about how you came to this position. I know that, uh, another sector of your life that's, that's brought you to where you are right now, which has been, you've gone through a lot of dark times, happened on July 10th, I believe, 2013. So take me to that, that call. The worst thing in police work is silence. You know, soldiers will say this too. You know, there'll be great wartime soldiers and they're really good in the chaos. Peace time soldiers, that's when they get in trouble. I think Jesse Ventura, he classified himself that way. He goes, I was a great wartime. Peace time, I just

didn't want to shave. I didn't want to do all that stuff. So silence in police work is deafening. You know, I remember that particular night, we were working on what's called a pitman schedule, which is a 12-hour shift. And it was a Wednesday night. You worked Wednesday, Thursday. I would have been off Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. So we sort of put the town to bed if you're working the midnight shift of a 12-hour shift. You go around, you pull on doors, you check your plazas. You can remember it's a suburban town. It's a very service-oriented type of police work. And I remember pulling up to my partner that night. We're drinking coffee. and we had officers covering the desk.

So my shift on the desk was coming up very shortly, I think at about 11. I remember telling him, God, I wish there was anything. I just, an alarm call, something to get me out of the car, something just get me moving because this is mind-numbing. So I said, you know what, I'm going to go do my checks. I'm going to go pull on some doors. And I pull into this plaza parking lot. And over the radio, you know, that's how life changes.

Life changes at the crack of a radio. Start heading to this address. Unknown 911. It's an open line. I can hear arguing in the background. I don't know what's going on. This particular address that we were dispatched to that night was a well-known address. There was ongoing domestic issues.

I think three or four days prior, the female resident applied for a temporary restraining order against her ex-boyfriend who sent her a picture with a Glock 9mm to his head. So we knew about it. We knew where we were going. We kind of had an idea what was going on, even though it was an open 911. one call. 911 when it was set up, its officers always respond to 911, no matter what's going on, even if it's a misdial. So we start heading down there. I can tell you the route. I turn around real quick. My partner was right behind me because we had just left each other. I could tell you the route I took, tell you the speed I was going. It's like 1040 at night, 1045 at night. And we're doing about

70 miles an hour. No sirens, lights. We're trying to get there. But we're trying to get there quietly because we don't want to alert anybody of our presence. We pull up in front of the residence. It's a townhouse complex. There was three of us that showed up. My supervisor and my partner and I. We pull up, I park right in front. You know, not, it's just something.

Leave my car running right up in front. And we go up to the door and I pound on the door. And I can hear a voice on the other end saying, don't come in here, don't come in here. And I can hear somebody, there's arguing. I run back to my car real quick. what's called a Halligan bar. It's just a little fireman's crowbar. Now, in situations like that, cops have to come up with a plan very quickly. And it might not be the best plan, but it's the best

plan that we could come up with at that particular moment. So that's what we did. My partner was going to go around the back because it was locked by both houses on each side. He was going to cover the back sliding glass door. I was going to cover the front. I had my supervisor with me. And on a signal, I was going to start hammering the door, pop the crowbar in, we're going to get in the door. You know, contrary to popular, believe you cannot kick down a door, especially a steel door. The Hill Street Blues was full of shit. So with signal happens, I start hammering the door lock to get the to get the wedge in. And I hear pop, pop, pop, pop, four gun shots. Drop the crowbar, retreat behind a little small window.

What had happened was the guy inside knew we were coming in. And he started raising his gun to kill the woman. And my partner, through the sliding glass door, volleyed, they volleyed rounds at each other. suspect was hit once in a small in a back not a not a moral wound but what i found out later was had we made entrance to that front door he was going to shoot us he he was ready to to go out guns and blazing so you pull back and at this time you know it was a small the surrounding town started to arrive we needed help they started to come and they were covering the front entrance i run around to the back around the townhouse and there's four of us there uh supervisor standing behind the deck and the three of us, our plan was to go on to this little privacy deck,

this little 9 by 10 foot, 10 by 10 foot privacy deck. And we're going to go and try to make entry. Our plan was is to throw an object through the sliding glass door, gain entry, and go in. As we're coming up on the deck, we can see the victim. She's over in the corner. She's got her knees to her chest and she's hugging her knees and she's just terrified. You can tell she's not doing well. But we don't see the suspect.

So I go off to the, the stairs are off to the left. I go over to the right. The other two officers are over to the left. And it was the most, it was most tactically advantageous place I could, I could see because I could see the whole area. But I still couldn't, I'm looking for this suspect. And the victim's eyes are looking. She's fixated. We weren't quiet.

She's fixated at this one point. The chair goes through the window and the brightest flash I have ever seen in my life. I feel that warm heat. I feel the blowback of gunpowder. Because if you ever shot a gun, you get little pellets, the little piece of sand, it feels like. This guy just was around the corner. He just shot.

The bullet came within a half an inch to my left ear. And my ear wiggled. So there's glass all over the deck. I hit the ground. And everything just, like time just slows down. There was no panic. There was no fear. And I'm thinking to myself.

Like it was so slow that my keys, which you used to put on your radio antenna, fell off. I put them back on. Now I'm laying there. And what I thought was the best tactical position is now the worst tactical position. I'm ready. This is not going to end well. I think about my wife at home. My wife, Trisha.

I have a three-year-old and I have about an eight-month-old. My three-year-old will remember me. My eight-month-old is never going to remember me. And I sort of make myself right in the head. And I said, now he shot at police twice. There's no reason to say why he's not going to shoot a police. least again. I prepare to die and it's a weird feeling. You know, you can hear everything. You can smell everything. I could tell you what I smelled that night. I could tell you what I heard. And I get in a

shooting position. I get in a prone position. The other officers were retreated off the deck and now they're yelling back. Are you hit? Are you hit? And I honestly didn't know because you're told all the time if you get shot, you're not, most likely you're not even going to know it. I see blood everywhere. And I'm like, I don't know. I see a lot of blood. My shoulder hurts. I wasn't shot, but what I found out later is the blood came from. I fell on the glass. I fell on my forearms. And the glass just tore me up. But I'm, I'm prepared to die. And I was trapped there. Now, I can't crawl out. If I go right through that broken glass and he's going to be able to kill me. I still can't say him. The other officers, thankfully, one of the officers ran. So he ran away, left me for dead. I'll never

forgive that guy. I wish him the best, but I'll never forgive him. The other two officers stayed. One of the officers, now I'm not a small guy and I'm not very nimble. One of the officers grabbed the back of my belt and assisted me out towards the stairs while the other officer held cover. I get out. Good. We're done. We see the suspect. He runs upstairs.

And since he's not shooting in us, we're not going to shoot at him. The victim gets up, stands up against the wall and just eeks out the front, out the garage. So now the job's over. We call over to radio. Hey, victim's coming out. Don't shoot. It's okay. I don't care if the guy stays in there for 10 years now.

We did our job. We protected life. And that's what we were tasked to do. So then we have to hold perimeter because now we have what's called a barricaded suspect. He's upstairs. He's calling 911. He wants to talk to somebody. I don't care.

Do whatever you're going to do. I'm not overly concerned about this. We hold, we hold perimeter for two hours. In the July heat, my arms are all torn up. I got glass shard in my forearms. I still have some glass in there today. until the state police teams unit, which is like their SWAT team, shows up, they relieve us. Now, mind you, this whole incident is about two and a half hours.

My cell phone is in my car, which is still running in front of the house, which I can't get to because he's upstairs and he could shoot me. We know he has a gun. I can't even call my wife. See, police world's very small. When somebody hears something, the wives are going to talk and they're going to call each other. And all I'm thinking, now that I'm out of danger is, I hope my wife doesn't hear this before I have a chance to tell her.

I get forced into an ambulance. I didn't want to go. Forced into an ambulance, I borrow one of the EMT's cell phones, and I call my wife. And this is like 1230 at night, 1245 at night. And imagine, maybe 1 o'clock, imagine your spouse of a police officer. You know your husband's working. You get a call from an unknown number that late at night. And it's me on the other line.

I said, Tricia, I was in a shooting. I'm okay. I'm not shot. I have to go to the hospital. I have to get glass removed from my arms. I'll call you as soon as I can, and I hang up the phone. My wife is one of the strongest people I've ever met in my life for being able to take that on and not lose her mind in the middle of the night with two small children.

I go to the hospital, and they remove the glass from my arm, as much as they can. And I go home. I go home. We get the suspect out. He gets arrested. I can't believe what happened. This is not the job. You never expect anything like this to happen, but it did.

So I go home. And I'm so amped up. can't sleep. I go out for a run. That doesn't do it. I try to get some sleep. It doesn't really work. When I finally get up, my phone's blowing up. You know, everybody wants to know what's going on. I check on the other officers who are there. That's my primary concern. Are you guys okay? We'll figure this out together. I hug my wife and my children. Thankful that I'm home. So they tell me at the hospital, you don't have to go back to work Thursday. So great, I got a four-day weekend. Awesome. This is a vacation because at the time, you know, everything's good.

We did our job. We did our job well. You know, life moves on. But I don't have to go back to Monday. Thank you so much for sharing that. Kind of like your experience with your dad, when you're going through these things, you know, your natural process is to do your best to move on, you know, but we very often don't know what's actually happened to us as a result. Concept of post-traumatic. I know that you don't call it a disorder, you know. I think I've heard you call it PTSD instead of PTSD. I love that. For the first time I heard somebody say that. But it's actually not a disorder. So the psychological circles are starting to classify it as post-traumatic stress because a disorder is so so the reaction to trauma is natural and normal. Therefore, it cannot be a disorder.

It's a, it's the brain's normal reaction to trauma. In the spirit of my show, it makes perfect sense. I love that. But tell me about this because, you know, what's ironic about this for me right now? I know what you're doing right now and I know why I do what I do. And it, it, it just ironic. comes from a really shitty experience. What was it like? Because you didn't know that you had PTSD until it started showing up. What was that like for you? After this event, did you just feel like you'd go right back to work? Because you're in this heart-driven, passionate, service-oriented thing. You're probably grateful that you're alive. How did you know when you had a problem? So my wife overjoyed that I'm home. We want to just get away. We get her

mother to watch the children, her and I go out and get something to eat, we're going to go see a movie. We're going to go, we go choose a comedy. Obviously, you don't want to do something too heavy. She's just grateful that I'm okay. We go out and watch, this is the end by Seth Rogan. And no, knock on Seth Rogan, but this was not the movie I should have went to go see. There's a- interesting choice of movies to go see. At the time, he was big. But there's a scene in the beginning of the movie where the people who are good get sucked up to heaven by this big bright light. And and people who aren't so good stay on earth. But there's this loud noise and it's a big bang.

As soon as the bang happened, my chest felt like my heart was going to explode. I started sweating. I couldn't breathe. And now I'm sitting next to this woman who has endured so much. And I can't tell her because, number one, she's not going to understand. She's been to her enough. So I just excused myself. I said, you know, we went out to eat.

So I blamed it on my stomach. I said, you know what, my stomach's not feeling good. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I go out into the hall and I can't move. I can't breathe. I can't talk. I'm pouring sweat. My shirt is soaked.

I don't know what's going on. I'm stronger than this. I grew up in a hellhouse. I grew up doing every bad thing known to man. And I can't handle this. Like, what the hell is going on with me? And you start feeling weak. You start feeling less than yourself.

And you just, you're just plunged back into that chaos that you just took, I was 38. I got plunged back into chaos at 38. I didn't know where I was going to end up here. So my wife, you know, and every time I tried to go back in there, because this is like 15 minutes, I'm standing out there. The door just feels like lead. I can't move the door. I can't.

So finally she comes out and she goes, you okay? And I said, yeah, you know what? My stomach is so upset. Go back in there. I'll be right in. She goes, nah, this movie sucks. And we go home. She took pity on me because she knew something wasn't right.

That was the night that I started having some of the worst nightmares of my entire life. You know, it starts, it's just like, do you ever have one of those nightmares when you're sick? And it's just, you never have that restful sleep. That was me. Every night, pull your gun out. You're on a job. You pull your gun out and you pull the trigger and the bang flag comes out. Or you pull your magazine out to load your weapon and all the ammo spills everywhere.

And it's just, it's chaos. That weekend, we go down to see my parents and we bring the kids down. And it's fine. I was very quiet. I was very contemplative. My brother, who was also a cop, started asking me about it. And I'm like, I just remember going like this. Just, no, I just, this is not the time.

I really don't want to talk about it. So as we're going to leave, my three-year-old spills chocolate milk all over his seat. I lost my mind. I mean, I lost my mind. We had a two-hour drive home, and my wife was begging me on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey to pull over and let her in a three-year-old and an eight-month-old out. That's how bad it was. But that trip home taught me something, told me that something's going on. I need help.

and I call this cop hotline, and they pair me up with a therapist. Let me ask you a quick question. When that was happening with your kid, if you can remember, did you know what you were doing and how fucked up it was? Or were you just fully in a reactive mode? I couldn't stop. It was just like, it was, I just couldn't stop. I couldn't let it go.

It was just chocolate milk. He's three years old. But you were unaware, you didn't have the ability to observe it from another vantage point and see that it was happening. It was involuntary. It was just like happening. It was disgusting is what it was. It was awful. And I can see that now through time heals those wounds. And I can see that now. But when I was in the middle of it, it was just this built-up rage that was just coming out over and over again. So Monday, I call this help line and they sort of talk me off a ledge a little bit. But Monday, I have to go to the doctor's because I have to get

the remainder of the glass removed from my arms and find out what my medical status is in order because I'm still planning on going back to work. Well, the nurse, I'm sitting in the office, and the nurse is picking away, and I can feel the glass in there, and she sees me, she sees a look on my face. I hadn't slept much. And she says, you okay? And I said, yeah, you know, it's just glass.

It's no big deal. And she said, no, I'm not, it's not what I'm talking about. I'm like, are you okay? And that question broke me because I just started crying in the middle of a doctor's office. And I knew there was something that was seriously wrong. Well, that day, my department scheduled what's called a critical incident, a critical incident stress management debriefing. That's supposed to be

taken care of within 48 to 72 hours, because you got to remember, police departments didn't really deal with mental health at that time. If you ask me how much training I had in the Police Academy on mental health, it's a big goose egg. We had none. It's, we were told from day one, if you got a problem, be quiet about it, because they're going to take your gun away. So I go into the department for this debriefing, and we go through it and all. And one of the lieutenants had mentioned something about, we had our shotguns taken out of the car for some reason, somebody left around in there or something. And I was like, oh, great, you know what?

Some good will come out of all this, some good stuff. And then I found out they were only going to be in supervisors' cars. And again, it was the same thing with my son. I lost my mind. I started yelling at a lieutenant. These are things that I could get fired for. The people around me, the other officers who were there, picked me up and walked me downstairs, and we went outside.

And that was the second to last time in the police department. the next time I was ever in the police department was to pick up my retired ID. I never went back. I went to work Wednesday at 7 p.m. on July, July 10th, and I was never a police officer again after that. One of the things I'm trying to make sense of is the stigma of overall, you know, men's mental health, but we're in the belly of the beast here because this is, you know, this is a precinct, you know. So part of what I'm hearing is that you're supposed to keep it quiet if you're having a problem. but there's also a fear of losing your job and so many things.

But when you got to that point where you knew you had a problem and it was apparent that you were no longer going to be able to work as a police officer anymore, did you feel any compassion at all from the precinct, your superior officers or some of your brethren? Or as you remember it, did everybody just kind of like pretend it wasn't happening? What was that like? So administration, absolutely not. The administration was cold, uncaring. As a matter of fact, during a deposition, my old chief of police, the man who hired me,

thought I had retired because I had glass in my arm. Well, they don't give you your pension for having glass in your arm. There were people who reached out occasionally, and then there were other people who I expected to reach out that did it. But here's the thing. So those people who did reach out rarely got the phone picked up by me because I didn't know what to say. I was not good.

I was just, I was starting to drink, and I was starting to drink. and I was starting to go down this bad hole. Were you ashamed? Very ashamed at the way I was acting. I was stronger than this. I'm a cop, for God's sake. I'm supposed to be stronger than this. And then the people who didn't reach out,

I was really mad at them for a long time. I'm like, you know, you were supposed to be my friend. How are you so cold that you don't even have this compassion towards me? Well, looking back, they didn't know what to say. And if they did call, I wouldn't have picked up their call anyway. So forgive and forget. I don't bear any ill will towards. them. And I'm seeing therapist after therapist and things are getting worse because now they're

prescribing me things. The protocol is an anti-anxiety and an antidepressant. Antidepressants have some of the worst side effects I've ever experienced. Now, you're already feeling like less of a man. Take an antidepressant, you're going to feel like less of a man. The anti-anxieties, actually, I like the anti-anxieties because I was drinking so much and it was starting to become really expensive. But if you take a couple of colonopin and you start drinking, you get drunk really quick, but it could kill you. People die of that all the time. Probably not thinking too much and being too concerned with dying at this point, though. No, then you start having the suicidal ideations, suicidal fantasies. Now, I never carried my off-duty gun. Never. I started carrying it because I wasn't

sleeping. I was paranoid. I'm drinking. I'm drunk all the time. And I can't work. Talk about the busy bee has no time for sorrow. Well, all I had was time for sorrow because I hadn't, I wasn't allowed to work. I wasn't even allowed to work. I worked the second job at the time. It wasn't even allowed to work my second job. So I'm home all day long. What's going on with your wife at this time? I mean, she's watching you. I mean, this is a wife that picked up on the fact that you needed to go home at the movies. Is she just getting conditioned to realize that you're just fucked up and doing the best she can? Or are things escalating at home? You know? So my wife bore the the brunt of a lot of my bad behavior. Because when you're when you go through something like this, it's thought.

action. There's no buffer zone. I'll give you a for instance. You're walking down the street. You see somebody who's done you wrong or you're not friendly with you, but I like to split in their face. But then there's that piece of your brain that's going to say, you know what, that's not a good act. When you go through something like this, it's, I'm going to spit in her face and you do it. So my wife got called every name in the book. My wife got screamed at constantly. My wife got the stuff thrown at her. Now, the worst thing I ever did to my life is I spit right in her face. Wow. There is no more demoralizing action than spitting in part. your partner's face, the person that you're supposed to love above everybody else.

And she took it. And she can just... Are you guys still married? Yeah, we're still married. She's awesome. Tricia Donaldson, I mean, she... We're offline. You gave me her address.

I'm going to send her a fucking... So I spend the rest of my life trying to make this up to her. That's the downside of this. The downside of this is I have to always... I have to always be the better husband because of all the stuff that you went through. Well, I mean, in the same. And we'll get to that in a minute here. You're also spending the rest of your life working within the realm of helping people that, you know, might be going through what you're going through. So we're in this, we're in this dark space. We're numbing ourselves. We've found out how to make ourselves drunker and for cheaper. The way I'm looking at it is like there, there is no way out. I know what it's like to actually be in that place where killing yourself is an option. So the point of that came my son.

My younger one, he's a baby, he would cry and it would drive me crazy. It would just, my anxiety would go through the roof. But my three-year-old, my three-old, I bought him all the toys that I had when I was a kid, you know, Nerf guns and stuff. One day my son points a Nerf, and there's a maneuver, police will do, where you rip the gun out of there and you sort of just turn it around. You practice it over and over again, so it becomes mechanical. Well, my son pointed a Nerf gun at me, my three-year-old, and pop,

I do this maneuver on him, not thinking, and I look at his face. And I don't know if you have children or not, but. That look, that blank look on the kid's face, like, oh, my God, what happened? I know what I did. I took the gun. I broke it into, and I threw it in the garbage. And then I walked out of the house. I took my truck.

I parked in in a lot. I walked about it. I turned my cell phone off. Throw it in the glove box. And I walked about a mile in where there's a wooded area. And I stayed in the woods for two and a half days, let's say, three days. Wow. I had a bottle of water.

And I just sat up against a tree. Didn't sleep. Just thinking like my life is just. absolute mess. I'm becoming this monster to my family. I'm not any good at home. I'm not even pulling in, like I'm getting, I'm still getting paid, but in my mind, I'm not a productive member of the family. So I start coming up with plans on how to do it. Now, I had my gun with me. And so that would be one option. For whatever reason, I didn't. After three days, I go home. And I'm, I, I stopped sleeping into bed because I was having night terrors and I didn't want to wake my wife. So I'd sleep downstairs.

About two in the morning one night. I said, all right, this is. it this time write a note all the bank passwords anything that i think that she's going to need with whatever damage whatever irrational mind i was having i go into my office which was a converted bedroom and on my wall i had all my memories you know my grandfather or my my diplomas and anything that i was ever proud of accomplishing and i stood and i'm looking at this wall and i have my my my gun in my hand it's a chief special 38 smith and weston loaded up at hollow points i take the gun and I put it in my mouth. I still feel the metal on my teeth. You ask me that the metal on my teeth, the site's brushing against my teeth. I cocked a hammer back to make it a single action

instead of a double action. I put my thumb on the trigger. The ridges are very clear on my thumb. And I replay this incident in my head. And I'm crying and I'm looking for a reason. Please don't do this. Please, please, please, please. Just give me some reason that I don't have to do this stuff. because this is not what I want to do, but there's no other option. I have no out. And I held this gun in my, what seemed like forever, but it's probably about 15, 20 minutes. And then I just pause. I just stop, pull the gun out of my mouth, and I hold it in my hand, and I'm just looking at it.

I'm on my knees, like, there's plush carpeting on the ground, and I just have this brief pause. And then you start thinking afterwards. You're like, I was just going to kill myself in my house because I'm a burden to my family, but my kids could come down and find me. They're going to hear the gun shot. They're going to get woken up. My wife's going to come. Her husband's head's going to be missing.

Oh, my God, what did you do? The next day, and I never told my wife didn't know that for the longest time. The next day, I take my gun. I call a buddy, one of the guys I still did talk to. I said, look, I can't have my gun in my house anymore. Can you just, and no explanation needed. He's like, all right, bring it over in a safe. He takes it.

I give it to him and the guns out of my house. But unfortunately, there are many different ways that's going to cat. I want to just capture something there because there's a part of the whole culture of police officers, like you said, where people won't talk about things, but it doesn't mean they don't know about things. And it shows up sometimes where you could be like, hey, get this fucking gun out of the house. And there doesn't need to be a conversation about it. It's just like, I'll be right over. So was there a lot of that in the police force where there was this just mutual understanding,

yet maybe you're not supposed to talk about certain things. Like there's a lot of communication that can take place with energy and eyes and stuff. Probably the same thing of when you guys can't talk to each other and you're on site and there's a gunman and stuff and you guys are feeling each other's vibe. Was there a mutual understanding about some of the fucked up things you guys go through and how it affects you negatively amongst police officers? Or was it completely ignored? You try to be there for each other.

Okay, in whatever form and fashion, whatever that looks like, you do try to be there for each other. One of the guys who he would, he would forcibly come over my house. And he would call first, but I would never pick up the phone. Right. And I would sit in my driveway in a chair with my bottle of tequila. And he would just show up at my house and sit there with me. Yeah, that guy, the guy I handed my weapon too, he was another one that I did trust. To know. And trust is coming from, he's going to, he's going to take care of this and not tell

anybody because that's what you don't want anybody to know. You want to minimize the damage. Yeah. They're in their own way hanging by a thread. You know, it's like that's probably part of the, of the stigma. It's not just, hey, you're a man, suck it up. It's also like, I can't handle this. You know, right? Because everybody's got their own coping mechanism. So there's probably a lot of that going on where you don't want to become a burden on somebody else because they got enough shit to deal with, that kind of thing. Well, police officers were a little bit different. When we see the opportunity to help somebody, that's what makes us feel good. It's helping yourself that you guys are terrible at.

We're horrible. Like I said earlier, we're horrible at helping ourselves. We're really good at helping other people. I can't get out of my own way. But thankfully, these people put their own stuff aside in order to come just throw a lifeline. And they did. There was many other suicide attempts. There was, I tried to hang myself.

I tried to drink myself to death. I tried to take too many pills. And when you fail, this is the worst part. You already feel like a failure. Now you're failing and killing yourself. So now I'm like, I can't even do this. Like I'm a loser. I woke up on the garage floor after I tried to hang myself.

The rope breaks. I must have knocked myself out. Either I choke myself out or knock myself out, but I didn't kill myself. And it goes on like that for a while. But there was a therapist who really, there was the death. that I was told I could never be a police officer, which was one of the hardest days. He comes in, and my therapist guy named me, Dr. Eugene Stefinelli,

who old Italian from Newark, if you ever seen the Many Saints in Newark, that was him. And the guy was at Woodstock. I mean, he's like the forest gump of New Jersey. He brings in this gun, and it's a Colt 45, 1945, World War II, blue bakelight handles, and he puts the gun in my hand. And he's like, hey, listen, I'm looking at, I'm going to try to sell this gun.

What do you think of it? And I hold this thing in my hand. And you know, you don't want to seem on masculine. So you're like, oh, it's a nice gun. But meanwhile, I'm starting. He's watching my reaction. I didn't know this. He's watching what I'm doing.

I'm starting to sweat. And I couldn't get the gun out of my hand fast enough. And he tells me to the stay because he is a friend of mine. And he says, I knew right then and there you were done. It was almost like he was testing you. He absolutely was. Yeah, wow. And he also told me, you got to check yourself into rehab.

Right. He did. I checked myself into rehab. I got clean, I got sober, and I started looking at things without the bad decision making that alcohol team seems to accompany. One of the things I started around this time was group therapy. And group therapy was, you know, you feel like you're all alone in this world. But group therapy gave me the opportunity to see other officers in the same situation

who are going through the same exact things, the same troubles at home, and now all of a sudden you start to feel somewhat normal. You start to return to yourself, even if it's only for an hour once a week, you start to return and you start to say, okay, thank God. It's just a little bit of respite. I go through the whole retirement process and I finally retire June 1st, 2014. Now I'm 39 years old. I have no idea what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. 39.

That's young, man. Wow. I have no idea what I'm going to do the rest of my life. Looking back on it, I could have done, you know, you're free. You can do anything you want to do. It's nothing different than me going to college and being able to reinvent myself. I could totally reinvent myself. It's a freedom that very few 39-year-olds with a family have.

But you're not well. I mean, you've got to heal. I'm healing. I'm starting the healing process. But one of the things that really healed me, remember, really good of taking care of other people. As new people started coming in to therapy and I started helping them because I saw it in their eyes, I saw exactly the path that they're going to take. And I'm like, I'm not letting this person go.

go down the path that I took. Give him my phone number and I would stay with them and I'd hound them and I'd bug them and I'd show up at their house and I'd say, you know, listen. And I'd tell them. I'd tell them what I went through and it would just give them a little bit of peace. And the funny thing started happening is I started feeling better. When I, when I reached that person, when I just made an impact on that person, I can no longer be a police officer, but I can still impact lives. And I just started doing that. And I stayed in group therapy for a very long time. I helped a lot of guys through the pension system. And even to the detriment, you know, after you retire, you'll get some calls from police officers.

Hey, I'm thinking about retiring. What do I say? How about you tell the goddamn truth? All right? Because I went through hell to get to here and you're going to try to figure out what to say. That's the wrong way to look at it. And then, you know, that goes on for a long time. And I would, any time there was a shooting locally, I would find the person's information through back channels.

We'd get in touch with them. and I just call them and say, hey, listen, you don't know me. My name's Kevin Donaldson. I was an officer in Roseland. I was in a shooting. I had some bad times. Let's talk. Let's go meet for dinner.

And it happened. Providing them with something that you could have used. Right. Just some peace. That's all I want to do. You told that whole story about trying to find your identity. It's like identity 2.0 now. It's like here's an interesting question for you.

If you look at your whole story, you found your identity as a police officer. or was that a little bit of a mirage or a Fugazi? I mean, is who you are right now, the identity that you've always been searching for? It was always there, okay? I just had to formulate it a little bit better. Get to go through some shit to get here. I hope, hey, for the rest of the listeners, you know,

I hope that you don't have to go through all this to figure out what you're supposed to find me. I'll talk to you. But I was always service-oriented and always made me feel better to help my fellow man. You know, college on up. You know, I got into teaching to try to shape young minds. I got into police work to make a difference in somebody's life.

Well, those things all have a beginning and an end. They have a beginning and an end to everything and never put your full faith in something that's got an ending. You know, the only thing you should put your primary identity into is something that is unshakable, unwavering, and will never end. Too many cops do this. That's why the average cop will die five years after retirement because that's all they were. That's all they knew. And now they're left out into the wild and they don't know how to survive out in the wild. All they know is how to be officers this or Sergeant this or Lieutenant this.

And, you know, that's why we're losing so many officers daily. We just had another one. Say County Sheriff went into a restaurant, put a gun to his head, ended it. And it happens on a daily basis. The big problem with group therapy and the good feelings is it lockdown hit and everything shut down. Isn't that interesting, man? It's like nobody thought about it. that. I mean, people that were in therapy thought about that. But like, what lockdown meant for me is I was in the process of an adoption and I, Homeland Security shut down and we couldn't complete our adoption. But I never even thought about the fact like of all these AA and therapy and group therapy. I mean, like what happened? You know, they did, what they do that in fucking Zoom? You know? Zoom just doesn't give you the same. Yeah, you need to like I need to, I need to feel somebody's hand when I shake their hand. And, you know, and that's,

That's kind of the birth of my podcast. That was how it started. It's just an extension of group therapy. It's that simple. And that's the suffering podcast. That's the suffering podcast. You know, I started on a whim and my wife is used to my craziness. When did you start the suffering podcast?

The official first airing was December 21st, 2020. And I started it. Took to the airways. Yeah. So it was audio only. It was just, it was a hobby thing. In the same room I'm sitting right now is where it was start. episode nine, I bring my partner, Mike Fulace on, and him and I just vibed real well together.

He was another member of group therapy who I had helped through. So he got it. He understood it. You know, we've been going strong now for almost three and a half years. But the reach that we've had, so we took this concept of helping our fellow man, and we moved it one step forward. And what I realized is when I think back to the guy who shot at me, his name was Anthony Vokitura, it's all public record so I can.

say his name. I used to hate him. I used to really hate him because I feel he ruined my life. He took my career away. I'm looking back. And this is, this is how your perception changes. I'm looking back on him. I'm like, what did this guy have to get to? Right. Or to shoot at police multiple times. Wow. Put a gun, almost kill his, his fiance. It took me a long time to figure out that he wasn't shooting at Kevin Donaldson. And he was shooting at a cop. This was not personal. And then once I got to that point, if I saw him today, like if you, if you go back nine years and, I see him, him and I are fighting, fighting to the death. If I see him today, I'd shake his hand and I said, listen, brother, it's all good. You had to be through some really difficult pain,

and I'd give him a big, giant hug, because here's how I see it. He put me in the place where I was supposed to be. There's no chance meetings, right? And he put me in a place where I can really do what I feel best at, which is impacting lives. And it started with the podcast, of course. You know, you're getting people in with trauma and how they overcame at their method of overcoming, it's different for everybody else or for each individual person. And they're getting over their trauma and it's giving hope to certain other people. Somebody's going to listen to it. Somebody who's a victim of sexual abuse, childhood sexual abuse.

And we've had people from all walks of life. But it grabbed, you know, here's the bottom lines. It made me feel better. It was my form of therapy. Are you at your best right now? I am. I'm in most clear. Isn't that interesting?

Because, you know, one of the things we teach on our podcast in our community is to gain the ability and the new perspective of not just looking at things that happened to you, but asking how they happen for you, which takes a lot of work sometimes. So, you know, you just made that distinction in just a weird way. And a lot of people just won't get this because they haven't experienced something like this. But like that guy played a big role in you being at your best. He played the most pivotal role.

Isn't that crazy? Did you ever see the movie Joe versus the volcano? Of course. Okay, I want to watch, I want you to rewatch that movie. with these type with this sun kissed uh with the will pony wool watch that movie now with what i'm going to tell you there's symbols in that movie that movie is that movie is so underrated it's crazy there's symbols in there you'll see this this this this this windy road that goes backwards and upwards and downwards and backwards again and upwards all throughout the movie that symbolism

is from the the path he walks to get into work to the path he takes up to the volcano it's this long windy road right and sometimes it goes back Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes to the right and the left. That's my path. That is my path. My path is I started at the bottom of this volcano and I took this long, windy road. And one day I got to the top of a volcano and I decided to jump and it spit me out. Spit you out.

And put me in a position where I'm supposed to be. I feel the best when I reach somebody. Like that's when I start feeling, okay, there's value to all this stuff that I've been to this. It's no longer why me. it's why not I was the person who did this because if it was good if this opportunity was given to somebody else they may not have been strong enough to do it and it's no knock on them it's I was the person that was chosen for this mission I'm going to complete this mission until the day I die that's what that's so sad about those stories about the guy that goes into the diner and and

actually kills himself is you look at a guy like that and recognize not only what a shame man that guy could have helped a lot of people if he made it through that. So you got to, you got to wonder if God, the universe, the powers that be spared you for a bigger purpose. I'm sure you think about that stuff. I have never met one interesting person in my life that doesn't have some junk in their past. That's right. Never once. And this show has put me on the path back to my faith. On episode 17, I have a gentleman named Adam Bert in. Adam Burt used to play professional hockey for 14 years. I figure out somebody introduced me to him.

He lives locally. I'm going to get him on this budding show. He agrees for whatever reason this guy agrees to, I mean, this guy fought Wayne Gretzky in the National Hockey League and now he's going to come in in somebody's basement to talk on an audio podcast. I mean, what is going on here? Turns out he's a preacher. Yeah.

He's a preacher. He's a man of God. I always said if I ever had the chance, Kim, because she's passed away to be. meet Mother Teresa, I'd be like, what did you do? This is manifested into how I met you. You know, we were at this creative con and you were talking about, I was actually there when they actually had their book launch, but paired up with an amazing individual and Chris Anderson, who is, what is the name of the TV show? It's escaping me. He was on first. And then reasonable doubt. Reasonable Down first 48. So you guys get together and he's got his

own story. That's another one. Maybe I'll have him on the show sometime. But tell me about this book, man, you're crazy and what it means to you and what your mission is, what your purpose is. So it's just stuff just keeps coming in front of me at the right time. Yeah. I'm on Clubhouse. A friend of mine, Charlie Ciferelli says, hey, you give Clubhouse a shot. I go on Clubhouse. I'm like, hey, you know, it's just like a glorified chat room. I don't really know what this is and stuff. I need this woman on there, this woman, Julie Loken. Yeah. That's all I know you. Yeah, and I just, and I meet this person and I meet Chris on there.

She's, oh, I want to introduce you to Chris. She, you know, she tells me who he was. And I, once I saw him, I knew who he was. And we hop on this. She goes, I want to get together on a Zoom call. I just want to talk. I just want to talk. That's all I want to do.

I said, okay, you know, so I hop on a Zoom call. Chris is there. And Chris and I start, we just start. First time you met him. First time I met him. We just start going back and forth. You know, we're two cops. We know the game.

We can spot another cop. And then, J.C., I'm not lying to you. Out of that Zoom meeting, man, you're crazy is born. While we're in that Zoom meeting, Julie's doing something on the side. She comes up with the basic format for the cover. And then we just start this year-long journey of writing this thing. But I was so amped up. And I had all this stuff to come out that she wants us to give in 3,000 words in like a month.

I give her 20,000 words in 3.5. That's right. I'll just throw it up. You know, I'd throw it out. And, you know, it's a long, again, even writing a book, you know this for certain. Even writing a book is just a long, windy road. It's never a straight line. It's exhausting.

And, but I found a lot of peace in it. And I love doing it because it was the first time that soup to nuts, my whole life is down on paper. No matter what happens to me, no matter what happens to me after this show, I have this legacy that is out there for my kids one day to discover. And they kind of know what happened, but they don't know the full story because they're, you know, they're 14 and 11. So they don't know the full, full story, but they have a pretty good idea. And they know I wrote this book and stuff. And, you know, Chris and I got together. And when we get together, it's the, it's the funniest thing.

It's like we knew each other our entire lives. And he's from Birmingham, Alabama. You guys don't look anything alike, but you walk around like brothers. We do. And, you know, we just sort of hang. Chris and I spent some time in February of 2023. We spent a few days together in New Jersey. And we just really got to know each other. And we'll call each other up from time to time. But we meshed real well. And there was that synergy in there. And then we bring it, Julie introduced us to Dr. Sherry Campbell, who wrote the opening and the closing. She's been on my show. Yep. Dr. Sherry, I got to tell you, she is she's something else yeah just don't ask her about her parents that's all well so that's the part

her and i we we we we and she's everybody has been such a big blessing when it comes to this stuff and i'm overly grateful and we launch in chicago and the book goes number one and um and i'm starting and people are my friends are starting to buy the book and they're reading a book and they're telling me about it. And it's just, it's this another level of reaching people that I never thought was possible. It keeps getting better. I am a poor kid from Southern New Jersey. Yeah. I am not this type of person to, to reach people to be. This was not supposed to happen. No, I'm not supposed to be sitting here with Dr. J.C. with Dragon. I'm not supposed to be sitting here. Right. Okay. But something led me here, this long and winding road. And every day I got to pinch myself that

I can't believe this has happened. So great place to put a bow on some things. What I'd love you to do is end with what is your message for the world and also let everybody know what it is that you determined was the biggest lie. Biggest lie I ever told myself is the world that's better off without me. Right. That is the biggest lie I ever told myself. The biggest lie that anybody will ever tell whoever's an advocate out there for whatever it is,

whether it's sexual abuse, whether it's mental health, whether it's mental health and first responders. The biggest lie anybody will ever tell you is those are the biggest lie that other people will think about them is that they have it all together. I still have my days. I still have my moments. I still get down. I suffer from imposter syndrome constantly.

So just because I go out and advocate for it, don't ever think I have it all together. If you can look upon people, I mean, you could go down the line. You think Jordan Peterson's got it all together? I'm telling you what, he doesn't have it all together. He says it openly he doesn't. Nobody has it. that's the biggest lie. And my message to the world is you're never as good as your best day, nor are you as bad as your worst day. You sit somewhere in the middle. And there's peaks and valleys

in every walk of life. And one of my favorite Psalms is Psalm 23. Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. It's a very important point in that. I walk through. Yeah. You know, when it's too dark and you can't see and you're walking through that dark space, Just keep walking because eventually you're going to hit some light. But also you got to remember when you're in that darkness and you think that you're all alone, there are people next to you. It's just so dark you can't see. But they have night vision and you have to trust that if you're walking forward,

they're going to keep you in bounds. They're going to keep you in play. And when it starts to get a little lighter, you'll look around to your right and your left and you're like, holy cow, these people have been here with me all the time. Now it's my turn to be that person walking with other people. That's fantastic. So obviously get out there, be in the show notes. I don't know what format.

You might be listening to this as a podcast. You might be watching this on a YouTube video. There's going to probably be a long format of it and a short format. I think we just had like a 12-hour discussion. Check out the suffering podcast. Go get the man, your crazy book. The last thing I'd love to do,

and I'll put this in the notes as well, if somebody's listening to this and they're going through a rough time or know somebody that is, what advice do you give somebody like, somebody that's on the edge, you know, double action has been taken out and they're cocked back and they're like almost at that point. What do they do? They're about to make a permanent solution to a temporary condition. With every peak, there's a valley. And if you're looking for what to do and you don't know where else to go, come to one of the more jacked up people you'll

ever meet in your life. Come find me. I'm very easily found. Everybody is allowed to come find you. everybody I will not turn anybody away and and you know what for as much craziness as I do get I'll weed through that craziness in order to get to that one person that needs it but I'll put myself out there in order to do that that's all I want more than likely I'm not going to know how to help you but I get guarantee through the relationships that I have built I'll get you to the right people wow man thanks so much for being on the show what a great conversation I like to feel that I can go around telling people that Kevin Donaldson's my friend now. So I don't know if you ever. Stop bringing poop emojis out on stage after I get on there.

That's never going to stop. But you now have, I don't know if this was part of your mission and your vision or just another thing you never thought would come to fruition, but you now have a friend named Dragon. Never thought that would happen. Thanks so much. And thanks everybody for spending time with us. Have a great day. Thank you.