Lost Your Identity? Rebuild It With Truth

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Have you ever had a moment where you realize that you cannot go back to who you used to be?

Not because you don't want to, but because something in you or something in life has changed.

And so today we're talking about what happens next.

Today we're joined by Dr. Carter Chex.

So he's a clinical chaplain, a health care ethicist, a professor, and the author of healing in the wild.

And his work focuses on something most people don't talk about.

What happens when a role ends?

And you don't know who you are without it.

So whether there's a career, relationship, or leadership role, or a version of yourself you can't return to,

today we're going to go in deeper and talk about what happens after that identity.

We're talking about identity, moral injury, and how it actually rebuilds your life.

Dr. Carter, this is such an important topic and so beautifully timed.

I'm so excited. It's good to have you here. Thanks for being here.

Yeah, thank you Lisa for having me.

And in your right, there's a moment people don't talk about very often.

And it's that moment when something ends and then you realize you can't go back.

Right.

And I'm not just talking about the role and not to who you were inside that role.

I remember a season in my own life where everything shifted at once,

relationally, spiritually, internally.

And there was a moment where I realized I couldn't go back to who I was before that happened.

Not because I didn't want to, but because something in me had already changed in that moment.

I wasn't just dealing with what happened.

I was dealing with who I was after it happened.

And I think that's what most people miss.

They think they're grieving an opportunity or a title or a position or a season.

But what actually collapses is something deeper.

It's the structure that told them who they were.

And so the real question is, what do I do next?

It's, who am I now?

When the thing that defined me is gone.

And I think that's where a lot of people quietly come undone.

So when you can't go back, the real question isn't, what are you going to do next?

It's whether you understand what actually broke.

Yeah.

So I remember a time when my whole life shifted and I woke up and I literally felt like a different person.

And it was incredibly disorienting because suddenly the routine that I had from that past role or identity didn't work anymore.

And it felt so disconnected and inauthentic.

And it was kind of like you're being shoved into another world saying, all right, let's start over now what?

I can be really scary place to be because you, you're right, you can't go back to that other identity.

Whether it is a relationship ends or a job or even a awakening of some sort, it just doesn't feel good.

It's like, you can feel this whole towards something new, even though you don't know what it is.

Yeah, 100%.

My story when I was in Korea and the service and I went through, you know, my experience where, you know, long story short, the army really offered me in my battle buddy up to, to prosecute us for assault and battery when we had defended ourselves against Korean nationals.

And after going through that and making it on the other side, I was still a soldier, I still worn American uniform, but that betrayal just made me question everything about my service, my identity, my worth.

And in a major loss that I experienced wasn't just the betrayal, it was, I wanted to be a career soldier.

And I felt like now that had been taken away from me.

And so, you know, at some point there, I realized I just can't go back or figure out how to move forward.

So you talk about this being more than just psychological. And so you use the term moral injury.

So what makes this moral and not just emotional?

Yeah, so a moral injury, if we just break it down to the bare roots of it, it's a violation of what's right to you.

And it causes a collapse in what you would consider to make you morally healthy.

And again, we're not talking about religion, we're talking about morality.

It's an alignment of your values, your identity, your beliefs, and that's subjective.

It's what's important to you, not what's important to me that I think should be important to you.

So when someone experiences a moral injury, they experience a deep violation of what's right to them.

And when that happens, the place where you make meaning, I'm going to call it your meaning-making system, right?

The place where you make meaning, where you make meaning about life, you make meaning about God, if you're a theistic faith, where you make meaning about the future.

The place where you imagine something different just gets shattered.

And a lot of times when you hear the word grief stricken, that word grief is attached to moral injury because what moral injury is, is it's a specialized traumatic grief.

It's a specialized loss.

And it really damages how you see yourself, how you see yourself in the world, how you see your worth.

And when I say, what does it mean when I can't go back, it means that that external door is closed.

But more importantly, the internal version of you that existed in that space you were in is no longer accessible.

So you can't return to who you were because that version of you was shaped by a structure that no longer exists.

Right.

And not only my own personal story, but I've sat across enough veterans to recognize a pattern.

They leave an environment where identity is clear, the mission is defined.

And belonging is that it's built in to the mission, right.

And then you step into a world where none of that is reinforced in the same way.

And it's not weakness.

It's a loss of structure.

So when the role ends, like when my role end, most people think they lost their position, they lost their identity, right.

But what they actually lost was the structure that told them who they were.

And once that structure is gone, people don't just feel lost, they feel undefined.

So what moral injury does is it damages the structure of what makes you morally healthy.

And then you feel like that's when that structure is gone, and you just feel lost.

And you feel undefined or uncomplete.

Yeah.

And a moral injury for me may be different for you.

And so that is another layer.

And so something that feels immoral to me may not to someone else.

And if you talk about it to someone else, they may not see it like you see it.

But you feel you feel the disoriented feeling.

And so that can add another layer of confusion because then you're questioning your own view of it.

Am I overreacting?

Am I should I just push through this?

And you question that.

And that makes it so difficult.

Yeah.

And a lot of people, Lisa, they'll argue that well, isn't moral injury, isn't this psychological?

No.

It's not a psychological wound.

It's a wound to your meaning-making system.

If you're going to call it a wound or anything, it's a wound to your, your, your conscience, your, your identity, it's a wound to who you are.

So it's not psychological.

It, it's not just psychological.

It's more than that at your core.

It's moral.

And this isn't just emotional pain.

It's what happens when something you believed was right no longer holds.

And now you don't know where to stand.

So people lose more than stability.

They lose orientation.

What they believed about.

What was right?

What would hold who they were in relation to that that's been disrupted?

It really, you know, if I had to, you know, I've been a suicide prevention specialist in the VA for the last 11 years of my professional career.

And I would argue this.

And I know that you and I've had this conversation before.

Sometimes in medical systems, we're so symptom driven, you know, anxiety, depression and PTSD.

We're so symptom driven and not that that stuff's not important.

It is.

But we're so symptom driven, we miss people.

Well, when you miss people, that's where moral injury exists.

It exists in the person, not the symptom.

And so I would argue this.

I believe moral injury causes more people to die by suicide.

Then anything we could pull up in the diagnostic systems manual that has a Z code to it that insurance companies pay for, right?

I believe that we'll find out in the years to come that moral injury is one of the major drivers to suicidal ideations and actual suicide deaths across the board.

And this isn't just a veteran thing.

This is a human thing.

You don't have to look at a person's symptoms, but then look at their life holistically.

And so if you're missing the big pieces, if someone has a life that is not balanced, like if there's not a balance of a purpose and health and connection and community.

A whole bunch of things.

Then I feel like there's going to be some disheve show up.

And when you go see a conventional doctor and I'm not, I'm not again, like all of these symptoms are important.

But you need to be able to look at your life holistically to see what pieces are missing.

And start trying to detach from identities that you think you are.

That could be another topic for another day, but.

Yeah, man, it often feels like, you know, you're doing everything right.

And then all of a sudden life changes in a moment.

And you're like, wake up and you're like, who am I?

And how do I start over?

Do you have any real life examples of people that you work with?

It's kind of gone through these things.

And maybe you can relate something to the audience.

I mean, they'll understand it a little bit better.

Yeah, let me, let me share this that there's a difference between role loss and identity loss.

Right?

Role loss is external identity loss is internal.

So you can lose a role and still know who you are.

But when identities tied to performance or responsibility or impact or the loss of that loss of role destabilizes the cell,

that's when people say, I don't recognize myself anymore.

And that's not, that's not confusion.

That's disorientation at the level of identity.

So when you say, give me some examples.

I work with a lot of high performers, business leaders, athletes, you know, special operators, first responders, right?

And they usually struggle more because their identity was reinforced by clarity.

They knew what mattered.

They knew their role.

They knew where they fit in.

And when that disappears, they don't just lose structure.

They lose the feedback that told them they mattered.

And here's where it gets really complicated, Lisa.

You can still perform at a high level and be completely disconnected internally.

You're right.

Competence can outlast coherence.

So from the outside, everything looks intact.

But internally, something fundamental has shifted.

And that is super important to recognize.

Yeah, absolutely.

It could be so difficult because people present so well.

You know, I think we spoke about this last time is I know there's been times where I've been barely folding on where I've been so confused.

So where I am in my own life, and I don't feel like anything, I don't fit in anywhere.

And internally, I just feel awful.

But on the outside, I'm not expressing that.

I'm not sharing that with anybody else.

That's a scary thing is like most of the time we look at another human being and we see them.

But we don't see what's happening on the inside.

So we assume everything is fine.

Why does this happen?

When a role ends under strain, whether that's betrayal or failure or impossible decisions or broken systems or let's say an event that happened to you.

The person doesn't just lose the role.

They carry unresolved tension.

So I've had conversations with people who did exactly what they were trained to do.

And the mission made the call carried the responsibility.

And then walked away asking, why does this feel wrong now?

I did what I thought was right.

So why did this end the way it did?

And the question doesn't run us all on its own.

It follows them.

It follows you where you go.

So remember, when you can't go back, the real question isn't what you're going to do next.

It's whether you understand what actually broke.

What are the risks of moving on too quickly or trying to figure out everything super fast?

I think the risk is not being seen.

Not being heard.

Not really understand understanding the struggle the most because their framework is it's usually built on trust.

And how things are supposed to work.

So like this, effort leads to outcome.

Integrity leads to stability and doing the right thing protects you.

And when that breaks, it creates something deeper than disappointment.

It creates disorientation.

And so because competence often outlasts coherence, people can still perform.

And they can still lead and they can still show up and look like you said,

like on the outside, everything's going well.

But internally, the alignment is gone.

And most environments reward performance, not honesty.

So the fracture stays hidden.

So being honest and intentional about where you are being vulnerable.

And come on, the word vulnerability is such a.

Taking a such like a bad word because vulnerability, you know, leads to leads to harm.

You can, you know, you put yourself out there and you can get hurt.

Well, you can also never put yourself out there and never get held.

So what's worse, being isolated and lonely.

Out on an island by yourself, never experiencing the things that vulnerability tells you, you know,

because no, at the end of the day, we, we, we enjoy love and encouragement and community and connection.

Connection is so important for us.

The, the best advice that I think I've ever seen for someone who is isolated, lonely, out on that island feeling like they're the only one to get around other people.

Be vulnerable enough to share your story, open up to a trusted advisor or that, you know, three a.m. friend that you got.

Because it encourages movement without integration when someone decides to take that pathway of reinventing themselves.

And listen, to reinvent yourself can be harmful. I've lived it personally.

There was a point when everything in me wanted to move forward quickly, new direction, new focus, new momentum.

I wanted to get past, you know, I didn't want to lay in the pain. I wanted to just go build a bridge right over that deep loss because movement.

Movement feels like control.

But when I, what I realized was movement didn't resolve anything.

It just carried the fracture into a new space.

So reinventions, it sounds powerful.

But most of the time, it's just movement that avoids what's actually needs to be faced.

You got to face it.

You got to face it.

I know that for, for me, with, with my post-traumatic stress, there was seasons in my life.

So where I felt like I carried a big stick.

And every time it came around, I was just going to show it what, you know, come on around here.

You're going to get the big stick. I was pretty good at baseball. I get it both ways, too.

And so I was going to come around here and I'm just going to beat this away.

And I realized some really powerful truths.

Number one, trying to forget is worse than remembering.

Because not only do you deal with the anxiety that you're remembering,

you're dealing with the compounding anxiety that you can't forget, even though you're trying.

And so the best thing to do is realize this is here in front of me.

It's not going anywhere.

I need to deal with it.

And just deal with it.

Embrace it the best way that I know how.

Whether that's with great therapeutic help, trusty counselors, you know, and all of that.

And see where it goes.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's like when you're super anxious, people want to keep themselves busy.

So they don't have to feel that anxiety.

But as soon as they stop, they feel the anxiety.

And it's almost like a million times worse.

And tell you to sit with it and face it.

It's not going to go away.

Yeah.

And isolation, look, not all isolation is bad, but isolation is usually what happens when you get into that place where you feel like nobody understands me.

Nobody's going to get this on the only one going through this.

And one of the great phenomena that I see in a lot of the group work we do around moral injury is when you have people who are sitting in the room, although they carry individual wounds.

They realize, oh, other people walk through this.

Other people experience isolation.

Other people experience loneliness and look, loneliness is introspective.

You can't look across the room and see who's lonely.

Loneliness is the most dangerous risk factor of any risk factor that somebody could encounter.

And loneliness accelerates everything because without someone who can sit with you in the ambiguity.

Your internal voice becomes the loudest one in the room.

And over time, loneliness doesn't just make things harder.

It distorts your internal voice until it's the only one you trust.

That's where things begin to spiral.

You can't stay in that place of loneliness too long because what happens is loneliness is what we call in the field a motivational phase factor.

So again, when you think of pouring gas on a fire, right?

That's, you know, sometimes not the most smartest thing to do, but it's combustible.

It explodes, right?

That's what loneliness does to suicidal ideation and behaviors.

And look, I know that I reference suicide a lot, but that's my context.

I'm a suicide prevention specialist in the VA working with veterans who are either have attempted to kill themselves or seriously contemplating.

So I know that's an extreme example, but let's deal with the extreme example so we don't ever get there loneliness is something that is a fast track to suicide ideation and behaviors.

So if we can learn to deal with loneliness the way it needs to be dealt with, then not only are we not going to think things like, man, the world would be better off without me, but we're not going to act it out either.

So how do we even start? How do we reinvent ourselves? How do we face the loneliness? So what do we do?

Yeah, well, reconstruction starts with honesty, not performance, not momentum, honesty about what did we lose?

So that's the loss is the common connector of all traumatic experiences.

It doesn't matter what you went through, you lost something and it's usually the loss that people struggle with, not the event, not not the combat situation, the sexual assault situation, the loss of a family member, the loss of a child, the loss of a job.

And that's just to name a few across the gamut, right? It's the actual loss. What did you lose? What was violated and probably most important? What still matters?

And then slowly you begin to separate those who you were in the role from who you are at your core. That's the work right there.

Who you were in the role and who you are at your core. That's where you begin, not with answers with accurate naming, because if you can name what actually broke, you can rebuild that with integrity.

But if you misname it, you'll keep trying to fix the wrong thing.

I don't know. Have you ever had that situation in your life where you're where this needs to be fixed, but you keep trying to fix this over here and you keep coming back to that? Well, there's a reason you do.

You keep coming back to that because that's the most important thing to fix in the moment. It's what did you lose?

Most often, the thing that we avoid is the hardest thing to face. For me, I'll own that one. I often try and fix everything but the main core issue because it's the most difficult, the most challenging, the most emotional.

The process is going to be the hardest to face. I think that's true for a lot of us.

Yes, it is 100%. And I can't not emphasize the importance of don't do it alone.

Do you have to do this alone? Find a group, find a friend, find a community where you can walk together as you walk it out.

It's so important.

Yeah. So what does processing what was lost instead of bypassing it actually look like?

Yeah.

We use a word a lot and people always confuse this word biblically. It's the word lament.

And lament is yes found in the Bible, but it's also just a word. And it's the ability to take and put words to your suffering.

So it's why people instinctively a lot of times want to journal.

They want to just write it down because sometimes writing it down could be easier than actually vocalizing it.

But once you write it down, then maybe you can share verbally. Well, that's the part of communication.

You have to be able to communicate how you're feeling and what was lost.

Have you ever sat with people and you ask them how they're feeling and they tell you a random story?

Yeah.

Yeah. It's because feelings are really difficult for a lot of people.

And they don't even know how to assess what something feels like.

So they usually instinctively tell a story because a story is distracting.

I experienced this a lot with veterans because hey, this has been honest about something.

If you like what veterans do or what they did in their in their day job, then stories can be really some can be cool.

Some can be heartbreaking.

It's one of the reasons I think people are drawn to theater and movie. It's that movement of stories that are shared.

But when you're trying to assess the root of what someone's suffering with, sometimes the stories can be very distracted.

Now, I'm not talking about narrative. I'm just talking about the stories, right?

So you ask them how they feel. You're looking for that narrative of maybe when their father told them they'd never amount to anything.

And then they go into the service to try and show their father that they're going to amount to something.

And then they get over into service and end up having to kill a kid in combat.

And now they really feel like they're never going to amount to anything. It wouldn't matter how many medals or decorations that they got in that combat situation.

And maybe when they killed that kid, that kid had a bomb and they got an award for saving everybody else in their company because that kid was going to blow up, but that kid was seven years old.

And it doesn't matter how many awards, how many athletes, how many times someone would say you did the right thing that person skilled a kid and that will never rest right with them.

And there's nothing that you and I could sit across from them and say to justify that they killed a kid.

So where do you go from there?

Because the reality is this they're not a kid killer.

They had to kill a kid in the moment.

Because the end result would have been lost lives, maybe their own, those that were closest to them.

So can you live with that? Let's say you let the kid walk through it, blow up everybody else.

You know, can you live with that?

Well, the realities, you don't want to live with either one.

But when people are placed in impossible situations, they have to search for an impossible way forward.

And the only way forward to do that is with honesty, intentionality, and integrity.

You just got to take the first step and having a companion to walk with you is so important.

Because most people in those situations, they don't recognize themselves.

They don't recognize themselves, right?

And the fact that you don't recognize yourself doesn't mean you're lost.

It just means something that once held your identity has changed, and that's disorienting.

But it's not the end for you, right?

Most people assume that feeling something, you know, means something's wrong with them.

But often it's just a sign that version of yourself that was once tied to that role or tied to that season.

And a structure that no longer exists for you.

So don't rush to fix it.

Don't rush to replace it.

Slow down long enough to ask an honest question.

This is the question.

What actually changed?

And what still remains?

Because if you can name what broke?

And you can identify what's still true about you underneath all of that.

Then you can begin to rebuild in a way that isn't dependent on something that can be taken from you again.

And here's the thing.

You're not starting over.

You're learning how to stand without something you used to lean on.

And that's where real identity begins.

Talk to Carter. How important is it?

Who you surround yourself with?

Because you often talk about environment and context.

So how important is in?

Is who you're around in this healing process?

I think it's so important.

And it actually can define the whole process itself.

You know, I think we would agree that if you needed plumbing work at your home.

You're not going to call an air conditioning tech.

Right. It's it's so it's like this is not going to happen, right?

And so you got to think about the mechanics of the injury as well.

I'm not going to go to a brain surgeon for a heart surgery.

So when you're dealing with complex things like trauma, loss, deep, deep suffering.

Get with people who understand not just from a theoretical academically.

But from an experiential lane.

And listen, I'm not saying that person has to have a doctor in front of their name like I do.

And that that's not what I'm saying.

Because there are a lot of people who have degrees on the wall that aren't qualified to walk with people with what they're going through.

They just have a degree.

Get with people who are trusted and timely companions that will walk with you.

Where you need to go.

Not where they believe you should go, but where you need to go.

Because this is the thing.

It's your journey.

Not theirs grief is a wilderness.

There's no map that anybody can hand you for what they've personally been through that will walk you through what you've personally been through.

The reality is you have to draw.

Here's the real reality.

You are drawing your map of recovery.

Every day you move forward.

It's your map.

You know, when you go into the wilderness, you can look at a place on a map.

And you can be like, OK, I want to go here.

And you can start on your journey.

But once you get there and you're actually walking that terrain is the first time you realize what's physically around you.

What's spiritually around you.

And although I might have an idea of what could be along that path until you walk it or I walk it with you, we don't know.

There might be a river that didn't show up on that map that now we have to cross.

What if it's swift water?

What if it's deep water?

What if you can't swim?

There's all these variables, right?

So I think it's important that you that you go into the wilderness with someone that has a little bit of an understanding or hopefully a lot of understanding of the wilderness is.

You know, in military context, we have sear specialist, survival, escape, evasion, and rescue specialist, right?

For every region.

And before you go on a high quality mission into a specific area, that sear specialist who's trained for that region will let you know what can kill you.

What can sustain you food, vegetables, berries, those types of things.

What can kill you snakes, spiders, animals, all of that type of stuff?

Because when you get into the wilderness, you got to know how to survive.

Yeah.

So let's give the audience out there some hope there maybe there's someone listening that feels completely disconnected.

They don't recognize themselves anymore.

What would you say to them? What would be some first steps forward?

Yeah.

When you can't go back, the goal isn't to replace what was.

It's to understand what remains and build from there.

I know that sounds like this very.

Sometimes I feel like we're looking for these real long exhaustive 12 step things to do.

And it's.

Here's what I can tell you.

A lot of times when you've experienced specifically a moral injury that has shattered your concept of what would make you morally healthy.

What has happened is your entire meaning making system has been disrupted in a way that you don't trust systems.

You don't trust people.

You don't even trust yourself.

So what you've got to do first is breathe.

You got to breathe.

You got to breathe and you got center yourself and you got to after you know box breathing is my go to box breathing is very simple.

If you think about a box, you inhale for three seconds.

You hold it for three seconds.

You exhale for three seconds.

You hold that for three seconds.

Maybe you can hold it longer.

Maybe you need shorter.

Whatever matters is not the lead.

It's the concentrated breathing.

Do that six or seven times in a row.

And then find yourself a piece of paper and write down what still matters.

Once you can write down what still matters.

Right.

What you feel like has changed.

What has still mattered.

Then from there, you can take some honest steps forward.

Most people, I believe, run into cliche, you know, something they've seen on social media.

Not that everything you see on social media isn't bad, okay.

But instead of they instead of finding something trusted and proven,

they'll go for the quick fix something that sounds just right to them.

That's not always the best move to make because it's not a concentrated decision to focus on you.

I think in those moments, after you breathe, after you get clarity, find a trusted advisor.

Find something within yourselves or someone that you feel like you could go to.

I call them three AM friends.

They're great to have, right?

Because, you know, you really know who your friends are.

When you call them at three AM and they answer the phone.

And listen, if you don't have someone like that,

there's a national crisis hotline.

You dial nine eight eight.

You go straight to someone, a counselor or someone who is ready to talk to you.

If you're a veteran, you can press one and it connects you directly to veteran centric help around whatever you're dealing with.

So if you don't have that go to person, you can go right there, okay.

But there's something I call the shock of shame, okay.

Now, I know that many of you that are watching or listening,

you know that there is a physical shock that your body will take to absorb physical pain,

whether you've broken a bone, been in a car accident, you know, been shot or something like that.

Your body will go into shock.

And many times that shock is there to help you.

It's there to help you loosen the pain enough where you could get to help.

How else can you explain somebody who got shot in the chest,

running two miles in the jungle to get to the helicopter to get out, okay.

There's something supernatural taken over.

Now, that type of shock Lisa is great for you.

The shock of shame is not the shock of shame comes.

Shame tries to tell you anything you do to better yourself.

It's not worth it because you're not worth it.

You do it.

Best thing for you to do, which is to go hang yourself over those, you know,

get wasted on something.

Go put a bullet in your mouth.

Whatever that is, that shock of shame comes to do something.

It comes to get in your imagination to anything better.

And so there's a question that I ask every high risk veteran that I work with

because it's the best way that I know how to just smack shame in the face

and let shame know it's not controlling the situation.

Because many times when shame is controlling the situation,

it's also controlling the narrative, okay.

So it comes from motivational interviewing.

It's called the importance ruler.

So I say, look, on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being, this isn't important at all.

And 10 being, it's the most important thing in the world.

How important is it for you to live?

And the average answer.

Now remember, I'm dealing with veterans who have been flagged high risk for suicide.

So they either attempted or they're seriously contemplating it to the point

where all of their care teams have flagged them.

And they are on our radar.

That's special attention, okay.

The number one answer is a five.

And the second is a zero.

What happens with the shock of shame is if I were to ask you on a scale of 0 to 10

and you told me you were a five and I went,

how can I get you to a 10?

You're imagine can't, your imagination can't go to a 10.

You can't contemplate that.

You don't even feel, you barely feel like you're worth a five.

So trying to get you to think about what a 10 would be is impossible, okay.

But if I ask you to tell me why you're not a one and I shut up,

well now, now there's a differentiation.

You're out of five.

So you should be able to explain to me why you're not a one instead of a five.

And whatever you share, whatever they share in that moment,

this is the very thing that is keeping them alive.

This is the very thing that is most important to them.

Now, maybe they say my pet,

I promise I made to my daughter that I would walk her down the aisle.

The thought of not being with my children as they grow up,

something my grandma told me back when I was a kid and we were picking beans.

It doesn't matter what that is, but whatever they share in that moment,

that is what is sustaining life.

That is what is causing them to be resilient.

That is the core of whatever is going to make them flourish as a human.

So when you're writing that, when you get in that moment and you breathe,

just make yourself a little zero to 10 chart on a scale of zero to 10.

How important is it for me to whatever that is?

And then write a number and then go backwards.

Tell me why you're not a one.

Tell me why you're not a zero.

Write that down because that's the place where you need to start.

That's the place where you need to focus.

Because that is what shame is trying to tell you you don't have access to.

That's why we had to pull it from you.

And once you do that, then one day at a time,

not 10 days in one day, one day at a time,

do one thing, one positive reinforcement,

start building that number back up by the time you get up to the place

where you really feel like you're starting to get control of your imagination.

And shame is losing its narrative over your life.

Well, then a 10 is very accessible because everybody wants the 10 lives.

It's just how do we get there?

Yeah, thank you so much for being so open about this very important topic.

I think it's really important to know it also that we don't have to be anything.

So I think humans, especially after a very strong identity,

feel like they lose all of their work when suddenly they don't have a title

or something to identify by.

But it's literally okay to just wake up in the morning and live

and keep yourself alive.

If that's what you need to do, you know, breathe and make a nourishing meal

and just get to the next moment.

Because that little bit of momentum builds and builds and builds and builds.

But sometimes you just need those little little steps to make it to the next moment.

And that is okay. Society tells us that's not okay.

Because what society is telling us is that we need to suck it up,

get over it, push through it, move on to the next thing.

It's a life. What are you going to do kind of thing?

But it doesn't matter.

And so we need to treat it like it matters and really pay attention to it

and take it seriously.

To know everyone more about the work that you do and more about your book

and where people can find more information, please.

Yeah. Well, you can find almost all information that you want to know about me.

You can find it at Dr. Cartercheck.com.

I have a Amazon best selling book called Healing in the Wild

and it was just translated into Arabic to help war-torn refugees

that have been displaced all over the world.

Use nature as a way to deal with loss and suffering.

And listen, when we're hurting, we need someone to show up.

And I know I said it's important to have that 3am friend.

And I know I shared the National Crisis Line number.

But let me tell you what can show up when nothing else does.

It's why I wrote Healing in the Wild.

Because the wild does something most environments no longer do.

It removes what is artificial and leads you with will it is real.

And that's what you want.

When you're hurting, you want someone to show up.

Whether you agree with that or not, it's true.

You want someone to show up.

And in most settings, you can maintain an image and you can perform

and you can produce and you can stay busy.

And many times avoid what's underneath.

But the wild doesn't give you that option.

It slows you down.

It takes away the noise.

It interrupts constant input.

And in that quiet, you know, that place by the beach,

that place by the river, that sunrise, that sunset,

that hillside that as you're taking in the stars,

it all begins to surface, not all at once, but with honesty.

Okay.

And that's the reset.

Not because nature fixes you.

But because it creates conditions when you can no longer hide from yourself.

And you don't have to perform for anybody else.

It also reorient you physically.

Your body starts to regulate.

Your breathing changes.

Your nervous system begins to settle.

And when the body settles,

your thoughts become less reactive and less distorted.

You can actually see more clearly.

There's also something very grounding about being in an environment

that isn't asking anything from you, right?

There's no expectations in the wild.

There's no roles to fulfill.

There's the trees aren't asking you for pressure

to be a certain version of yourself.

It's just presence.

I always say presence is the best medicine.

And from that place, you can begin to separate.

Who you are from what you're doing.

That's where reset really happens.

It's not a quick shift,

but a return to something more stable, more honest,

something that can hold you as you begin to rebuild.

That's healing in the wild.

So if you want to learn about healing in the wild,

there's a lot of really cool practical steps in there for anybody

who has experienced loss in their life.

And I wrote it because listen,

not everybody will go into a clinical setting.

Not everybody will enter into clinical spaces and offices.

A lot of times they don't trust those spaces,

but the wild you can trust.

Thank you so much for being here.

What a powerful conversation.

Thank you so much.

It was my pleasure and honor to be here.

And to our audience,

thank you so much for tuning in.

So healing isn't about rushing to become someone new.

It is about understanding what bro.

And then rebuilding from there,

what actually feels true to you.

So again,

Dr. check,

thank you so much for bringing such a beautiful language to something

that so many people really don't know how to explain.

If you want to know more about Dr. Carter check in his work

or his book,

Healing in the Wild,

all of his information will be in the show notes.

And if this episode resonated with you,

or you think it will resonate with someone else,

please send it to someone who quietly might be going through this.

So they can begin to heal and get the help that they deserve.

Stay tuned for the next episode, everyone.

Take care.

Stuck the fridge for tip off

with a variety of non-alcoholic craft styles

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or online at athleticbrewing.com.

Near beer, fit for all times.