Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas, an expert in suicide awareness and prevention. They discuss Dr. Spencer-Thomas’ personal experience with suicide, her work in empowering youth and organizations, and her current focus on mental health in the workplace. Dr. Spencer-Thomas shares insights on grief and trauma response after a suicide, as well as the importance of addressing mental health in male-dominated industries like construction.
In this episode of the NEW You, Network for Empowering Women podcast, Christy Belz interviews Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas, a clinical psychologist, renowned international speaker, and impactful entrepreneur. Dr. Sally discusses her personal motivation to address mental health issues following her brother’s suicide. She also highlights her work with the Carson J. Spencer Foundation, including youth suicide prevention initiatives and the “Man Therapy” campaign. Additionally, she shares insights into workplace suicide prevention and the mental health challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Come with us as we delve into the potential of fresh opportunities, transformative decisions, and reimagining perspectives in this empowering episode.
In this episode, you will learn the following:
- Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas’s personal experience with suicide: Her father’s suicide attempt and subsequent impact on her life.
- Youth suicide prevention program: Empowering high school students to address mental health and suicide in their communities.
- Men’s mental health campaign: Addressing the unique challenges men face in seeking help for mental health issues.
- Work in organizations and the construction industry: The importance of addressing mental health in the workplace.
- Dealing with grief and trauma after a suicide: The complex and unique nature of grief after a suicide and the challenges of navigating grief within families and support networks.
Visit Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas’ social media pages
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sallyspencerthomas
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrSallySpeaks
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sspencerthomas/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sspencerthomas
Websites: sallyspencerthomas.com
Learn more about Christy Belz Social Communications:
Website: https://christybelz.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChristyBelzCoach/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christybelzcoach/
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christybelz
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:07 Christy: Welcome to NEW You, Network for Empowering Women Podcast. I’m your host, Christy Belz. Enjoy our array of talented, open-hearted guests and their willingness and courage to share their stories of second chances, life-changing choices, and new perspectives. We’re here to uplift and empower you and your journey.
00:00:40 Christy: So when I was 10 years old, I loved my daddy and he loved me. And I was heading to school one morning and he called me back up onto our big front porch and he leaned over and he said, I love you. I really want you to know that I love you. And I danced all the way to school because my daddy loved me. When I got home that day from school, my dad was in bed, and I couldn’t wake him up. And I thought I smelled alcohol, so I thought, well, maybe he’s drunk. And I kind of paced back and forth for a few hours. It was daylight savings time, so it got dark very early.
00:01:16 Christy: And so I was in the house. It was dark by myself with my dad, and I couldn’t wake him up. My mom came home. later, and I was in a full-blown anxiety attack, like I did not know what to do. And I said, mom, something’s wrong with dad. And so she goes in, she calls the ambulance, and here they come. And I am on the front porch of that big porch of our house, and my dad’s being taken away by the EMTs to go to the hospital. And I’m absolutely disassociated out of my body. What I didn’t know is that my dad had attempted to take his life that day and that suicide attempt and one consecutive suicide attempt of years later has really impacted my life. It’s really been something that I’ve had to deal with in therapy and I struggle with. My dad did not die by suicide. He died of a massive heart attack when I was 19 and he was just 47.
00:02:13 Christy: So I met this woman, Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas, when she was running an organization supporting men’s mental health and suicide awareness and prevention. And I am just so delighted to have her as my guest on the show today. I met Sally about, I want to say 10 years ago, right? I think.
00:02:31 Sally: At least, at least. Yeah.
00:02:33 Christy: Maybe more. Sally was running a not-for-profit called the Carson J. Spencer Foundation, which she will share more about in our conversation. And because I had the experience of having a father attempt to take his life via suicide when I was young, I was very committed to wanting to serve. And so I joined Sally’s board of directors. And that’s how we met. And we went out and championed all around the state of Colorado, working with students, young kids, around awareness around suicide and organizations. And again, I’ll let Sally fill in the blanks here, but I’m so happy to see you and thank you so much for taking the time. I know how busy you are to be on NEW You, Network for Empowering Women.
00:03:15 Sally: Yes, I’m so grateful to be asked and I miss you, my dear friend. We need to hang out some more.
00:03:20 Christy: It’s been ages, right? I think I saw you last at Camp Experience, maybe a local women’s networking event. Awesome. So Sally, I always start with the story like what brought you to this place? What brought you to where you are today, you know starting back… that story begins for you.
00:03:38 Sally: So, I think you know most of what I am doing today comes from that before and after moment of losing my brother to suicide on December 7, 2004. We were incredibly close, best friends in so many ways. And I had been in the field of mental health quite a long time before he died. And I knew he was in trouble. And I did everything I needed to do. And he still died. And it was absolutely devastating. So I thought, I can be crushed by this, or I can let it teach me. Do something in his honor that helps change things for the better and luckily I had a family and his friends, you know, we all felt the same way, that let’s use this moment to prevent what happened to him from happening to other people.
00:04:37 Sally: And that’s when we pulled together. I mean, I remember it was the night that he died. His very good friend, Sean, called my brother’s wife, Heather, and said, oh my gosh, what do we do? And she said, no matter what we do, let’s not let him be forgotten. And so it was that moment that Sean’s wheels started turning. And we got on these conference calls, all these friends and my little family. At first, it was a bunch of tears, and then there was a bunch of laughter because my brother was hilarious. And we had all kinds of stories to share of all kinds of funny things he did in the world. And then we resolved to do bold, gap-filling work to make a difference. So that was really the turning point.
00:05:14 Christy: Yeah, I walked this journey. Obviously, the Carson J. Spencer Foundation that we worked together on was in honor of your brother and his life and his legacy. I think I just finished a podcast with Dr. Nikki Dority. Nikki suffers from bipolar disorder and just talked about the stigma and, you know, the media and all those things. And I’m just curious if you’d be willing to share a little bit more about Carson’s journey, struggling with mental health.
00:05:42 Sally: Yeah, it’s always complicated. My brother probably first started showing signs early, but all of his signs were gifts. I mean, some of it was reckless, pain-in-the-butt stuff from my parents, but most of it was where his gifts lie. And then in his athletic risk-taking and his pushing the envelope and everything he did. When he got to college, he got into trouble and he got kicked out for a year. But in that year, he found his gifts as a salesperson. He went and spent that year selling encyclopedias. This was a long time ago. But within that one year, he learned he had the power of influence. He created a sales team in three states. And by the end of that year, he and his team earned enough points selling these books that he took his team to Rome and Hawaii.
00:06:33 Sally: He found that he was an amazing leader and influencer. And then you know went off and launched his own company in his mid-20s that ended up going national and he was incredibly successful. And he was charismatic and beloved largely because of that, you know, the lower ends of that hypomanic mood state that just makes you really engaging and powerful and driven and creative. And he knew he had bipolar condition from age 19 on and he tried everything to manage it well, but the problem is when you’re someone like that where all your gifts lie in the hypomania space, and then you take a mood stabilizer you lose who you are.
00:07:12 Sally: So he felt very dull when he was on medication. He didn’t have the drive and he hated depression like nobody likes that. And so he would get out of the depression and then he would go off his medication. And also, nobody talks about the really awful side effects that you get on some of these medications. He would gain like 40 pounds really quickly. So there was a lot of this, try a therapy, get off a therapy, try a medication, get off a medication. And he had multiple diagnoses from the mental health professionals, including, you know, ADHD, borderline, bipolar condition, all kinds of things.
00:07:52 Sally: So it was a courageous journey on his part to keep going back and trying all these different things to, you know, just stable out because, and then the last episode he had was really his first episode with full-blown mania and within just a few weeks he left his family. He bought a million dollar loft in downtown Denver, eighty thousand dollar car, Laptops for employees he no longer had because he separated from his business partner. He got on a plane spontaneously, did all kinds of really risky things in Chicago. He was just not thinking clearly and super impulsive and super extreme. And we all could see it was problematic. It wasn’t like this was hidden. It was very obvious. And one of the things that was really rough about those last couple months, was that unfortunately, one of the hallmarks of bipolar condition is people lose insight sometimes into the fact that what they’re doing is risky or out of character.
00:08:53 Sally: And so we were all surrounding myself saying, wow, these are a lot of really big decisions, Carson. Are you okay? And he would say things like, you don’t know me. I should have made all these changes a long time ago. I don’t need to. And then he’d hang up on me. It was just so heartbreaking. And so one-by-one he estranged himself from each of us during this really difficult time. And then when he met with his accountant and his accountant said you’re broke, you have no more money, you can get no more money, he just kind of woke up to the wreckage of his past and just flip-flopped into this awful depression. He lost 30 pounds. He stopped sleeping. He had a tremor. He couldn’t focus. And he came back to all of us, but I think in hindsight, he came back to say goodbye. And within two and a half weeks, he was gone.
00:09:40 Christy: Yeah, I’m so sorry. And I really appreciate you sharing his story because I’m always touched by who he was and how he was in the world and just how difficult this mental illness is and what can happen. So you’re a psychologist. And you were a practicing psychologist when he was going through this. I’m also taken by your story because of that, right? You thought that there, you would think that as a psychologist that you would have the skills and the ability and the resources and whatever to be able to change things or make things different from him. And I, I personally relate to this because as a social worker in my family, you know, I figured I should have the skills, et cetera. So I would love for you just to share like what is that? How would that feel like, what was that like for you? To have all that skill and all that knowledge and then know that you just can’t you can’t change it for him, right? You couldn’t fix it.
00:10:34 Sally: Yeah well, so a couple of things there one is cardiologists lose loved ones to heart disease all the time. And oncologists lose loved ones to cancer all the time. But we don’t put on them that they should have had all the answers to save everybody. But we do that with mental health professionals and mental health professionals do that to ourselves, but it’s not fair. Because there’s so many other things just like there is with heart disease and oncology. There’s so many other things that go into whether someone lives or dies that we can only control or do what we can do with the science that we have, and really just hope for the best. Ultimately, it’s what’s going on in that person’s body, in that person’s brain, in that person’s interpretation of the world that we really don’t have a ton of control over when you really think about it.
00:11:27 Sally: So I have never felt that I did anything but everything that I could with all the skills and knowledge that I had at the time. So I’ve never had that. I mean, I was devastated, of course, by the news. And actually, the night before, I wondered, should I go down and do something because the situation had gotten really intense? But then what am I going to do? At that point, the options are involuntary hospitalization, which we know, from decades of research, tends to cause more harm than good. So the options were limited. And we just said we’ll stay the course. I wasn’t his doctor, you know. I was his sister. So I also didn’t know all the things he was sharing with him and he was going to seek help. I mean again, right up into the end. the day before he died, he saw a psychiatrist who gave him yet another prescription for managing his mood and sleep and it was an activating event for him. And I’m not saying it caused it, but he said to my dad, I’m not a man who takes nine medications for his mental health. And that was the day before he died.
00:12:35 Sally: So there was just all of these factors and I think the other thing for me is, while I love studying psychology, I love learning about it and I really love understanding people’s stories, I didn’t actually love doing therapy. And I had transitioned out of that years before. And I think it’s partly because of this. When you do all the things you can do to the best of your ability, and then you have these catastrophic outcomes, I think the difference between therapists versus oncologists and heart disease is that we get to know these most intimate parts of people. So it’s understandable while it feels personal, even when it’s not. I think we carry a lot more responsibility.
00:13:20 Christy: Yeah. I totally hear you there. And I love your teaching. You have the most amazing way of communicating about suicide awareness, you know, and normalizing like suicide is like a heart disease. It is like a, right. It’s a mental illness. And unfortunately we stigmatize that as something as bad or as, you know, cancer is bad, but it’s not quote unquote, you know, bad.
00:13:45 Sally: Well, it’s how we treat the people that are going through it. So cancer, especially people who are fighting cancer are heroes. We honor their resilience in there and what it takes to live through that. We surround them with support and casseroles and love and balloons and flowers and go visit them, and you know, take over some of their responsibilities and you know when they’re going through these difficult treatments. We don’t do the same with people who are fighting different mental health conditions. We don’t know what to say. We don’t know how to support and so people end up doing this alone and feel really separated often from the systems and people that can really make a difference.
00:14:25 Christy: That’s so true. So, so true. I want to talk about some of the programs that we did at Carson J. Spencer around youth organizations and then move into what you’re doing now because you are internationally known expert on suicide awareness. Do I say this right? Suicide awareness and prevention. How do you title that now for yourself?
00:14:45 Sally: Oh, I think that’s fine. And also the grief and trauma response after a suicide death is another place where I spent a lot of time. And most of it today in the workplace.
00:14:55 Christy: Yeah, in the workplace. So I love when we were working together, we did youth programs. So we went into schools and talked to youth about it, creating programs. You did great work in organizations and got organizations like construction companies to really work through it. So, let’s talk about some of the, and you are, you actually wrote an entire curriculum, right, on how to communicate about suicide and suicide ideation, etc. So, I just want you to brag on yourself, but before you do, we’re going to take a quick break, right, and we’ll go to promo and we’ll be right back with Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas.
00:15:38 Christy: Hey, it’s Christy Belz. Many of the people you meet on my podcast have participated in my course called UPROOT. This 15-week course takes you through my transformational process of understanding your roots, what’s down there in the dirt you’re not looking at. Reviewing your path and collecting the tools for life success, I would love to help you on your journey. Learn more about the UPROOT course, take my quiz and see where you might be stuck down there in the dirt, and explore my transformational retreat opportunities at christybelz.com/uproot.
00:16:21 Christy: All right, we are back with Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas, just a leading expert in the field of suicide awareness and prevention and the grief response after the grief and trauma response to suicide. So I just wanted Sally to talk about some of the stuff that she’s created to be able to support people that experience suicide in their lives.
00:16:44 Sally: So one of the things that was really cool that we did in the early days was this youth suicide prevention program that was really unique. And it’s probably one of the things closest to my brother’s legacy that he had expressed. He wanted to get teenage kids into college programs that helped them become entrepreneurs. So in this program, we taught high school students how to be entrepreneurial and also how to change something fundamental about mental health or suicide in their community. So they had to do both at the same time. And it was really fun because we empowered these youth to take on a daunting problem, mental health challenges and suicide prevention for their classmates. And yet, whenever you unleash young people and say, go figure something out, They’re on fire about it when you tell them like here’s what you’re supposed to do. They shut you down.
00:17:39 Sally: So it was just so fun because we had all these high school classes competing against each other for statewide, and sometimes national recognition. And we called it The Fire Within, because these youth really got fire in the belly, to help their peers to learn how to do this and to learn how to be an entrepreneur, So that was a ton of fun.
00:17:59 Christy: Yeah I love that. I remember judging this contest. It was incredible what those youth would come up with. It would be mind-boggling. So incredible.
00:18:08 Sally: Exactly. Yeah. So it wasn’t just helpful for the youth and the schools which they were in, which they enrolled all their classmates in this effort. But then we would have the business community come in and be judges on their business plans, which they had to actually implement. It wasn’t just a plan. They had to actually implement it and see if it worked. And so it was exciting for the business community to say, whoa, look at what these creative young minds are doing. And sometimes they were able to raise a significant amount of money, which then they invested back in their business and had it grow the next year and the next year. It was great.
00:18:40 Christy: Yeah, so cool. What was the men’s program that had the funny doctor behind the desk, that campaign? What was that called?
00:18:46 Sally: Man Therapy. That’s the second big thing. So unfortunately, the youth program went down, but a lot of the lessons you know, consists to this day. And it went down because of funding. And working in schools is hard with all of the expectations on teachers. But I really feel like that spirit of youth-empowered leadership is a real key answer to youth suicide prevention. Around the same time we also launched a men’s mental health campaign in collaboration with the Office of Suicide Prevention in the State of Colorado and Cactus, which is a full-service advertising agency who really made the campaign incredibly engaging.
00:19:25 Sally: And so the idea was that, there’s a bunch of men that are falling through the cracks. They don’t identify as having a mental health problem And they’re least likely to go reach out for help. Even when they have an addiction, even when they’re experiencing suicidal thoughts, they will not reach out for help. So there’s this bunch of very high-risk men, that needed a different type of approach. And when we asked them and we said, what, what would you pay attention to? How do we get your attention? They told us two things. One, they said, we’ll listen to a peer way before we listen to any kind of so-called expert, ‘cause they’re not an expert in us. And then the other thing they said was, if you can make it funny, we might listen to it.
00:20:02 Sally: So we launched a funny men’s mental health campaign.
00:20:06 Christy: Hilarious. Hilarious.
00:20:07 Sally: It’s so good. It’s so good.
00:20:10 Christy: Are they still airing?
00:20:11 Sally: Yeah, my husband was just saying it came out a couple times during the Broncos game this weekend.
00:20:16 Christy: Oh, really? I didn’t see it.
00:20:18 Sally: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s evolved a lot over the last decade. We launched it in 2013. And since then, we’ve put together sub-campaigns for military and veterans, and sub-campaigns for first responders, and more recently, sub-campaigns for construction workers. We had a randomized control trial funded by the CDC in the State of Michigan that went on for five years that said, hey, you know what? This actually does work. So yeah, we continue on.
00:20:42 Christy: So cool. So cool. Well, I’d like to segue into what you’re doing now. And again, in my time in supporting your efforts at Carson J. Spencer Foundation, I know that we did some significant work around organizational, that we had several, a couple organizations very specifically experienced suicide in the workforce. And you wrapped around that and now become a leading expert. So let’s talk about work in organizations and what you’re doing now.
00:21:10 Sally: Yep, this has been the longest, and I would say the most impactful thing. Back in 2007 when we were looking at this. Oh, wow. All these men are falling through the cracks and actually this is national. You know the person most likely to die by suicide is a man of working age. Who has one attempt and it’s fatal, who’s never reached out to any mental health resource? So they’re missing all the health care interventions, all the, they’re aged out of the school system. Where are they? They’re working. The workplace is arguably the most cross-cutting system we have to reduce suicide death. And yet, the workplace is often, woefully underprepared, and I would say even scared to death about tackling something like this.
00:21:53 Sally: So we were like, well, let’s give it a go. And so in 2007, we launched a training that was then called Working Minds. And it wasn’t just a training. It was a program that had strategy pieces to it. And we were so psyched. We were like, woo-hoo, going to go save a bunch of lives. And we’d knock on all these employers’ doors. And people like no, that’s a medical thing. No one wants to talk about that. Yeah, people need to go to the doctors and we’re like, but they’re not, and they’re working, so maybe you can help and they would not have help.
00:22:27 Sally: And then like you said we had two early adopters that made a big difference. One was the Denver Fire Department and one was RK. Now called the RK Industries, a construction contractor here in the different metro area. They both had recent losses and they both went all-in. So rather sometimes, you know, if people haven’t impacted, they’ll have a one-off training, or one-off awareness day, and then they never do nothing else to change culture or to make it sticky. Well, both these organizations I give them so much credit. They went all-in because we’ve been waiting since like 2006 for someone with a large enough workforce to really take this seriously.
00:23:06 Sally: So by 2013, all these years later, to have two large organizations say, give us everything you got, we’re like, woo-hoo. We’re sad for the reasons why you opened the door, but we’ve been waiting for you for seven years. So let’s get to work. And both of them, within a short period of time, we’re like this is way too important for just our company. We’re already seeing impact. Let’s make this national and so both of them turned their company’s thing into a much broader footprint of influence. And then the next inflection point was 2016 where we got data from the CDC that ranked industry-by-suicide rates. And because we had been in the work, you know really since 2007, our fingerprints were all over the place. And so we were very easy to find when people started searching workplace suicide prevention.
00:23:59 Sally: And so then we started doing a lot more work in workplace, suicide prevention. And the high-risk industries, not surprisingly, are all the male dominated industries of gas, construction, transportation, mining. And it’s not to say that women are suffering less. They’re definitely, I would say, suffering equally. They just tend to choose less lethal means. That’s a little less easy to track. Death data is clear. Not all of the attempts, and certainly most of the thoughts and feelings, don’t get reported to any centralized body. It’s going to be a while before the women-dominated industries, although I’ll say the service industries, kind of a mess right now. They’ll catch up to what the men’s industries are doing.
00:24:44 Sally: So then the next inflection point was the pandemic. At this point, we had lots of data, we had lots of case studies, we had lots of program evaluation, and the world needed this work more than any time ever in its history. I mean, we were just, the phones were going off the walls. We had multiple, very large scale, in one case, multilingual global… it was just bananas. And I thought yeah, I had a global team of like 40 people, to help me implement all these things that were needed. So that’s the wave we’re kind of still riding today is that people…
00:25:23 Christy: So tell me what that looks like? Help listeners understand a little bit what that looks like.
00:25:27 Sally: So most of it was in construction and you know, these construction workers all over the planet were, they kept going. Those essential workers, they didn’t stop working. And many of them had all the strains and stresses that other people had, like worried about their loved ones and the disruption of the pandemic and all of these things. They also had to go to work. There was just a lot of strain. And it showed up differently in different parts of the planet, Christy, which was really fascinating. In Europe, because these are small countries and the borders shut down hard, there was just a lot of grief because people were just like right here to there, but they couldn’t go home… the funerals and the weddings and the babies being born.
00:26:16 Sally: So in Europe, there was a lot of grief. In Asia, we couldn’t even say the word mental health. So we had to cloak it all under, I don’t even know, some kind of worker well-being. We couldn’t talk about suicide. We couldn’t talk about any of those things because it was culturally too far from where they were having the conversation. So it was a very different conversation that we were having in Asia. In South America, interestingly enough, there was a ton of gratitude. Gratitude around having work. Gratitude around, you know, staying safe. There’s just so much gratitude. What do you think the most common expression was in the United States?
00:26:58 Christy: I have no idea.
00:27:00 Sally: Anger.
00:27:01 Christy: Oh, well, duh. Of course, we’re freaking angry. Silly me.
00:27:09 Sally: No matter where you were in the whole thing of it, it was anger. Everybody was all over different places around the globe around their experience of this, but it was all pretty intense emotional stuff. And so what we did was these needs and strengths assessments, with each of these job sites and helped them create strategies that were culturally responsive. And so that was really cool because we got to partner with these global mental health experts that knew their region stuff, but then we knew all these strategies and then we braided them together. And then on the construction side, we really helped empower leaders and managers to drive a comprehensive sustainable and impactful mental health program forward in this great time of need.
00:27:51 Sally: So that was just so cool. That was a big part of 2020-2021. Today, what the work that happened there has really rippled out into a mental health movement in construction. So today I spent about 85% of my time just in construction. It’s a big enough industry with a big enough need. And again, to their credit, they’re doers. They’re like, oh, we got a problem. We better go figure this out because people are getting hurt. People are getting hurt and they’re dying and it’s up to us. Where, you know, so many other industries want to talk about all the reasons they shouldn’t do it and spin the crystal, and be critical of it for decades, like we don’t have time for that, people are dying.
00:28:32 Sally: So I really appreciated their willingness and their, let’s dive in with both feet, tell me what you got. And then we test. We test it. We evaluate it. We tweak it. Rinse and repeat. So the scaling stuff that’s happening now, it just makes my heart so happy. I mean we are scaling through unions that are 400,000 people strong. And when I think about all of those lives that are impacted, it’s not just the workers, right? It’s families, Yeah. It’s so many people. So that feels pretty good.
00:29:07 Christy: Yeah. My heart, boy, is number one. I just so admire you and all that you do and your tenacity and, you know, Carson’s legacy, lives on through you and all that you do. And my sense is that the construction industry may be the forerunner right now, but I really see this scaling in a larger global way and your leadership and wisdom to be able to do that. We’re so lucky to have you.
00:29:35 Christy: I want to just ask you, usually ask a big nugget question at the end, but I’m going to be more specific with you. Because one of the things that we don’t talk a lot about with suicide is what happens when it happens, like the grief, the loss, like how do you deal with that? And you’re an expert in this area, too. So it’s a very traumatic experience. My dad attempted, he didn’t succeed, but it was very traumatic for me as a kid to experience that. And you have a lot of wisdom about that. So if we could just maybe wrap with some thoughts or ideas for our listeners about how do they handle the trauma, the grief around suicide.
00:30:09 Sally: So, there’s no universal experience, depending on a lot of factors like most trauma, what happened before, what your relationship with this person was like, how people supported you or not afterwards. All of these things impact people’s experiences. But that said, there are commonalities that many of us do experience. And for one, it’s a grief unlike any other, because nobody’s prepared for it. Everybody thinks it’s going to happen to someone else, unless you have someone in your life who’s attempted many times. And you have rehearsed that several times. But for the majority of the deaths, it’s on the first attempt that it happens. So you’re not prepared. You think it’s going to happen to someone else.
00:30:47 Sally: And then you fall into this Canyon of Why. Why didn’t they do something about this? And this is what our forefather, Frank Campbell says all the time, this Canyon of Why. Families fester down there for sometimes upwards of a decade, searching for answers that of course never come, stumbling around in this forest of this dark grief until maybe they stumble upon some kind of resource a decade later. And while they’re down there in the Canyon of Why, there’s all kinds of domino effects that start to happen. marriages get strained and often fall apart. People lose their jobs. Kids drop out of schools. There’s lots of financial issues because usually it’s often the dad or the breadwinner in the family that has died and there wasn’t really a plan for that.
00:31:30 Sally: So that’s one thing is that the grief is very complicated by all of this taboo, can’t talk about it, and sinful thing that sometimes cultures carry around with it. People can’t talk about it in their faith communities and so on. So you combine all of that with the fact that this is often a very traumatic death. So it usually happens suddenly, which means unlike more chronic illnesses, we don’t have all of that anticipatory grief where people can say goodbye and small things and say the things they need to say and have experiences and reflect on the relationship. You don’t get that with a sudden death. And that’s true for all sudden deaths, but with this sudden death, it’s also horrific. The death scene is usually horrific. It was just so much trauma.
00:32:15 Sally: And so I’ll just summarize the complexity with this last point, which is grief is often a move-toward response. You want to reminisce. You want to talk about this person and smell their clothes and look at the pictures and tell the story. Trauma is a move-away response. When we are traumatized, we tend to run, escape, or avoid, which means we don’t want to do any of those things. So within the same person, the same family, the same friend group, There’s this push-pull, push-pull, push-pull. And especially in the first couple of years, nobody can get on the same page. Some people want to gather and do this other thing, and other people, it’s too painful. And it just all feels so personal. It’s very, very difficult to navigate a mourning that works for a group of people that actually need each other.
00:33:02 Christy: Wow, that’s profound. Really, you know, because it’s so complex. It’s so complex. It’s unlike anything else, right? Yeah. Oh my gosh. So Sally, I’d love for you to share with our guests how they can get in touch with you, learn more. So do you want to share how our listeners can get in touch or learn more?
00:33:26 Sally: Sure. Probably the easiest way is just my name, sallyspencerthomas.com. I’m on all the major social media platforms. Not very active in TikTok, but most of the other ones I’m pretty active on. But sallyspencerthomas.com will get you to all the places.
00:33:45 Christy: Yeah, awesome. We’ll also have that in show notes, so they’ll be able to find you, too, at the end of this podcast. I love you. I respect you. I just am, yeah, namaste to you. The work you do is so profound and important, and I’m just so happy to be on the journey with you.
00:34:03 Christy: Next time on NEW You, we are going to talk to Laura Thomas, and the topic is going to be on grief. She, too, lost a brother to suicide, so these recordings are based on contributions to my book, Oh God of Second Chances, and a shared experience at the TEDx stage. So great. Thank you so much, Sally.
00:34:22 Sally: Thank you, Christy. It’s been a pleasure.
00:34:24 Christy: So when I was 10 years old, I loved my daddy and he loved me. And I was heading to school one morning and he called me back up onto our big front porch and he leaned over and he said, I love you. I really want you to know that I love you. And I danced all the way to school because my daddy loved me. When I got home that day from school, my dad was in bed and I couldn’t wake him up. And I thought I smelled alcohol, so I thought, well, maybe he’s drunk. And I kind of paced back and forth for a few hours. It was daylight savings time, so it got dark very early. And so I was in the house. It was dark by myself with my dad, and I couldn’t wake him up.
00:35:05 Christy: My mom came home. later, and I was in a full-blown anxiety attack, like I did not know what to do. And I said, mom, something’s wrong with dad. And so she goes in, she calls the ambulance, and here they come. And I am on the front porch of that big porch of our house, and my dad’s being taken away by the EMTs to go to the hospital and I’m absolutely disassociated out of my body. What I didn’t know is that my dad had attempted to take his life that day and that suicide attempt and one consecutive suicide attempt of years later has really impacted my life. It’s really been something that I’ve had to deal with in therapy and I struggle with. You know, my dad did not die by suicide. He died of a massive heart attack when I was 19 and he was just 47.
00:35:58 Christy: So I met this woman, Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas, when she was running an organization supporting men’s mental health and suicide awareness and prevention. And I am just so delighted to have her as my guest on the show today.
00:36:16 Christy: It is my joy to showcase the voices, choices, and stories of women and the messy details of life’s journey. As you’ve experienced, my guests are thriving with purpose and authenticity, but that does not mean that their life is easy and without challenges. I’ve dedicated my life to you and your journey. Thank you for listening to NEW You, Network for Empowering Women Podcast. Please subscribe and learn more at christybelz.com/newpodcast.