May 14, 2024 • 52 mins
In today's episode: Mindful Therapy Founders, Derek and Jessica Crain (1:11), Mental Health Awareness Month (3:34), Mental health surrounding the women’s basketball tournament (08:19), Caitlin Clark and mental health (12:47), Mindful Therapy Group (19:23 ), Angel Reese and mental health (20:50), Impressed with how Angel and Caitlin handled everything (29:12), Mental health awareness month stats (39:21), Show up for your people (47:15).
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Big Raised Garage Grind. I want to
bring awareness and my voice to something that's meaningful and
purchasel more than just who's the best football player, who's
the best football team? The intersection between life, football and
mental health. When you need help and you ask for help,
you're operating from a position of power. When you need
(00:21):
help and you don't ask for help, that's the weakness.
Now here's your host, Seahawk's Legend, Ray Roberts. What is up? Fan?
Welcome back to Big Raise Garage Grinme Mental Health Edition,
brought to you by the Mindful Therapy Group. And man,
it's been a long time since we've been back in
the studio. The season ended, had some other things that
(00:42):
were going on and happening that kind of slowed us
down a little bit. But hey, we're still hanging in
there doing what we do and making things happen. And
so we're back in here today to record another episode
a Big Raise Garage Grind Mental Health Edition. And before
I get started, I just wanted to also just give
a shout out to some people that have become really
(01:03):
good friends of mine. So, you know, we started a
podcast what maybe almost like a year ago or so,
just just not quite a year ago. And since then,
I've become really good friends with Derek and Jessica Crane,
who are the founders of the Mindful Therapy Group. And
let me just say this, they are unbelievably kind, caring,
(01:27):
and really loving individuals. They've invited me to different events
and things that they've hosted. They've invited me to their
vacation home down in Hook Canal. Derek checks in on
me a lot. We talk a lot, We talk about
a lot of different things. We share love for hip
hop and rap music, so we text each other music
(01:49):
back and forth. But Derek has been one of my
biggest supporters and very meaningful conversations and relationship that we've developed.
We've we've we've just had a really good time, like
figuring out this podcast, figuring out how to make an
impact in the lives of people with with around mental
(02:09):
health services and things, and and so it's just been
They're just a tremendous couple to be around. Uh. They
started this Mindful Therapy Group from the ground up and
has really built it out to be something pretty spectacular
with I think they just opened an office in Tempe Arizona.
They haven't. They have a couple offices here in the
(02:31):
Pacific Northwest and they represent other therapists, and so I
just want to give them a big shout out, man,
because I didn't know where this was going to go,
you know, when we first started, and we all sitting
in the room together and trying to figure out what
it is and what it's not and what we want
to do with it, and me trying to get to know,
you know, who they were, and man, it's just a
friendship has just grown out of it that that I
(02:54):
value quite quite quite a bit. And so hopefully in
the next episode I will get to interview Derek and
we can hear his story and how he you know,
came to you know, to create this, this organization that
represents and gives a lot of resources to a lot
of people that need it. And then his wife, Jessica,
(03:16):
is just as incredible and a little bit more seems
a little more quiet than Derek, but two tremendous individuals
that I just want to give a shout out to
for supporting me. They've done a really good job in
doing that. And so but to get on to keep
on moving this month is a mental health awareness month,
(03:37):
and he got me wondering, like, why this month, out
of all the months in the year, why this month?
And if my research is correct, I couldn't really find
why they picked us specific month. But it was established
in nineteen forty nine by the MHA, the Mental Health
Mental Health of America, and back then it was known
as the National Association for Mental Health. And the thing
(04:02):
that was shocking to me is that that it was
established in nineteen forty nine, and I feel like I've
just heard about it in the last three or four years,
and maybe that's because of my own mental health journey,
but it didn't seem to be as celebrated and seen,
you know, on different screens and things up until the
last few years ago. So I thought it was something
(04:23):
that was like a really recent established awareness month. But
it was established in nineteen forty nine to increase the
awareness of the importance of mental health and wellness in
American lives and to celebrate recovery from mental illness. So
I'm not exactly sure what triggered it, but it seems
(04:45):
like back then there must have been an increase in
mental illness that doctors were seeing at the time I
don't know how prevalent the psychology world was, but I
would have mad imagine that just in the regular hospital
general doctors, practitioners, that they were coming across this stuff,
(05:08):
and then as they started trying to find ways to
service it, that there came a point where they felt
like it was big enough and important enough to bring
an awareness to. So it's really interesting that it seems
like this thing has like mental health and the importance
of mental health and the focus on mental health has
really cranked up. It was cranking up a little bit
(05:28):
before the pandemic, and then after the pandemic, or through
the pandemic, and after the pandemic, it has really ramped
up to almost what you feel like like this is
a new thing that we're doing, but it actually has
been celebrated or highlighted, if you want to call it that,
since nineteen forty nine a by the Mental Health by
(05:50):
Mental Health of America, And so to me, it's just
another indication that mental health, it's a plays a vital
role in our overall health and well being. Just like
if you were going to go to the gym and
work out, or go outside and go for a walk,
or if you had a cold, or if you had
some other illness where you had to go to the
doctor to be treated. Mental health and wellness is no different.
(06:12):
And so speaking of that, you know, I try to
keep make some of the topics that we talk about
on here as current as I possibly can. And so
I'm a little bit behind the eight ball, but I
think it's still fresh enough to have a conversation or
just a little short little bit about it. But I
couldn't help but wonder throughout the whole second half of
(06:36):
the women's college basketball season and then into the NCAA
tournament just the ways that those young women were taking
care of their mental health. And two people in particular,
which you know, were kind of like the polarizing players
(07:00):
that kind of uh brought a lot of attention to
the game, uh and then also created the a lot
of the noise around the game, and that is Caitlyn
Clark of Iowa and Angel Reese of l s U.
And I thought it was interesting because I wanted to see.
I did some research to kind of see how either
(07:22):
one of them mentioned anything about mental health, and I
was surprised to see that one of the very first
articles that I that was on the Google list was
about Caitlyn Clark, and you know you can This isn't
an argument about if Kaitlyn Clark was is the is
the goat of all time? And all that other kind
of stuff, like you know, that's for other people to decide.
(07:45):
And and that was also part of what created a
lot of the noise around this season, was the was
the one side saying that that she's the goat of
all the best of all time and she's the goat,
and the other others others saying like, well, she's a
scoring champ and she does some cool stuff, but she's
not the greatest of all times. She doesn't have championships
all this other kind of stuff. And then how do
(08:06):
you judge a champion the greatest of all time if
you don't have championships and this, that and the other thing.
So this is not that conversation, but I thought it
was interesting that the pressure to perform and win and
represent an entire community of your college town and of
(08:28):
women basketball players was just outright tremendous and sometimes ridiculous
to me, just the pressure that was generated and the
noise that is generated not by the players but by
the people around it around the game and around them,
And to me sometimes that is that noise is the
(08:54):
most damaging noise of it all, because it's so much
about it that the players have no control over, even
though they're the center of the conversations. And then when
they don't show up or if they don't know respond
in a certain way, then either the supporters are going
to in hard on them or the haters are going
(09:14):
in hard on them. So it's almost like a no
win situation. If you play up to what you think
you can play, then your supporters are all for you
and the haters hate you. But if you play down
to it, then the haters are like hate more and
the supporters are kind of talking down to you. So
it was just to me, it was tremendous all the
news coverage, like wanting to know all these different things
(09:36):
about them and what they were doing and how they
were doing it. And to me, it reminded me of
when I took a job with the University Virginia, I
want to say twenty ten ish, and at the same time,
this guy Jim Bowman, who was a sports psychologist, and
(09:57):
he's here in town two and he was at why
State at the time. He's a sports psychologist for the
athletic department for the Washington State Cougars, and he took
this job to be the sports psychologist for University of
Virginia Athletic department. And we started on the exact same week.
I was a life skills director and Jim was the
(10:17):
sports psychologist. And within the very first week, Jim had
so many caseloads that they had to hire two more
psychologists under him to help him handle the caseload. And
the thing that he talked about the most was this
pressure to perform and to be on twenty four hours
(10:40):
a day. So you had to be the perfect student,
you had to be the perfect citizen in the community
and on campus or grounds, and you also had to
be the very best perfect player and win. Not just
show up and work hard, but the pressure to win
was tremendous. And so these young people were having a really,
really hard time dealing with this, and so I was
(11:02):
just curious to see how Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese,
you know, dealt with with it, because man, it it
had gotten too a place that it was hard to
enjoy the games because of all the build up and
the talk moving up to the game, if you on
social media had to kind of you know, cipher through
all of that stuff, all the different sports stations that
(11:25):
were kind of pushing their agenda and trying to make
this this rivalry, whether they're planning to each other or not,
even bigger than it needed to be. And man, it
just to me, it would just I don't know how
we could not take a toll on an athlete nowadays.
And so you can say, hey, well just block it
out or don't respond to it or don't read it
(11:47):
or whatever, but how can you, like, on every single platform,
did you can imagine that's all they were talking about,
whether it was Twitter, Face, Facebook, Instagram, uh, you know,
on TV, streaming, like every every possible place that you
could imagine having some type of communication with the public.
This conversation was happening. And then so much pressure has
(12:10):
been put on both players, uh, you know, to to
either to show up and perform or there was so
much hate and visceral and and disrespect coming at the
at the players that they themselves I don't think warranted,
you know. And uh, and so I thought it was
really interesting and what I found was that they had
two totally different approaches to it, and I think both
(12:33):
of them are responses to you know, like this type
of stress in some cases it can be traumatizing. UH.
And so I think they that they both had what
they felt were appropriate responses. And if you think of
Kaitlyn Clark, Caitlyn didn't ever seem to openly respond to
(12:53):
a lot of the noise that was going on. It
seemed like she kind of kept her her camp tight,
and she kept her comments short and just to the point,
and then she just played basketball, was with her teammates
and with her family. That's what it appeared like appeared
to me. And people may say, like, well, you know,
she's very calm and and you know, mature, and so
(13:16):
that was a mature way to handle it. But also
that could also be a response distress and trauma is
to kind of tighten your ship and like keep things
close to the cuff and not let people in and
protect your you kind of protect yourself with your family
and with your team and with with your support group.
And what I found is is that Caitlin is a
(13:38):
proponent of therapy and she works with sports psychologists and UH,
and something she found, UH, I think I guess the
quote says it was something she found super helpful throughout
her time at Iowa, and the quote that she had was, uh,
(13:58):
that should be normal for college student athletes. It should
be normal for college student athletes to engage their therapists
and sports psychologists on their staff, and most teams do
have them now, and she acknowledged that therapy can play
can be a place to share both the letdowns and
the great things that happen along the way. And I
(14:20):
think that's important because some people think that going to
therapy and having these mental health crises or situations is
all about negative things and things that fall apart and
things aren't going your way, or negative feelings that you have.
But sometimes you have to figure out how to handle
the success too, because that can also bring more stress
and more expectations, which she was definitely under. And then
(14:44):
she goes on to say, it's such a stressful period
of your life. You're eighteen to twenty two years old
and trying to figure out which way your life's going,
which way your life is going to go, while so
many eyeballs are on you, and it can be difficult
at times. And so I don't know that had you
not read this quote or maybe if this was like
(15:07):
a live feet or something, if you would ever have
known that about Caitlyn Clark, because she always seemed to
be so cool, calm and collected. But she's telling you
that even with all the success that she was having
and with all the support that she was having that
she was she had a tough time dealing with all
the eyeballs on her. Like she just wanted to go
(15:27):
play basketball. She wanted to go win a national championship.
That was a lot the only thing that she had
not accomplished. She was the scoring leader, and I think
she was also like the all times assist leader, and
then she was the all time just basketball college basketball
and general scoring leader, so she was all time women
scored and just the all time score and then she
was also the is the assist leader. But she had
(15:51):
fallen short with the national championship. So I would imagine
that those were the things that were on her mind.
Was trying to help her team get to that place,
and so she seems to have surrounded herself with the
right people and to try to maintain her space and
(16:12):
help her manage things. Honestly, I was in Indianapolis. I
want to say, two weeks ago, two or three weeks ago,
like right after the w NBA draft, there was there
for special Olympics. We were having some meetings there and
we're actually staying in the same hotel as Caitlyn Clark.
And it was interesting because she and her mom and
(16:33):
I think it I don't know if it's a brother
or a boyfriend or something, but it was she and
her mom and a male They would post up right
outside our conference room every day on the second floor
in the corner of this hotel, so you know that
she is keeping things tight. She it wasn't like she
(16:56):
was being stand offish or wasn't to engage people, but
you can tell that she was trying to keep a
space distance from people so that she can be in
a safe place to kind of be who she needed
to be and do the things that she needed to
excuse me, do the things that she needed to do.
And it's really funny though, because a lot of people
(17:20):
on our team, we probably had maybe forty people there,
and all forty people saw her, and thirty nine of
us was so in alle we couldn't even like get
get to our meetings and everyone. It was interesting because
if you have young kids, you know that, like when
(17:43):
you have sweets and candy and stuff like that around
and it's sitting like on a table and you can
just see them just staring at it, like and their
hands are just like right here, and like every time
you look, their hands are getting a little bit closer.
They just can't. They just want to grab this food
and this candy so bad. That's what it was like
watching these adults walk past Caitlyn Clark. They wanted to
(18:05):
say hello, they wanted to make eye contact, they wanted
to take a picture, they wanted to get an autograph,
but they were and they were trying so hard. You
could see everything in there being like trying not to
even like do anything to disrupt the the atmosphere around
Caitlyn with here and a mom sitting in these two chairs.
It was really, uh really kind of funny to watch
(18:26):
and uh and just watch people just uh really uh
get to that that kid place in their demeanor around her.
And so it was pretty cool that, you know, Caitlyn
kept her cool. She she and her mom kept showing
up to the same spot and we had our people
walking by her and people didn't bother her. But it
kind of gave me just a little peek into, you know,
(18:47):
the the what she deals with and in a place where, uh,
this is a big, huge hotel and she and her
mom had found this little corner of a of the
hotel to kind of hide out. And then we had
our big special Olympic meetings right there next to her,
but we did a good job of keeping our distance.
But to me, it just speaks to the people that
she has around her and the way that she approached
(19:08):
this whole idea around mental health and all this stress
and pressure and things that she's under. And as we're
talking about the mental health stuff, and we talked a
little bit earlier about Derek and Jessica Crane, who started
the Mindful Therapy Group. The Mindful Therapy Group, based in
the Pacific Northwest, is a diverse group of qualified mental
(19:29):
health providers offering both in person and virtual care, whether
it's talk therapy or medication management. You can book your
first visit within one week. Visit Mindful Theapygroup dot com
to start your journey to better mental health today. And
like I said earlier, just getting to know Derek and Jessica, man,
they're amazing people. And this is an amazing group. They
(19:52):
do a really good job of matching individuals with therapists
that can serve their needs. And you know, like I said,
you've said this before, sometimes this is not the first
therapist you come across. You may have to go through
a couple of them to kind of get the person
that becomes that is your person that you kind of
connect with. And they do a really good job of
doing a lot of that pre work before they start
(20:14):
to connect you with a therapist from their team. And
they also do a good job of supporting those therapists.
I think one of the things they do is they
help beginning therapists or young therapists establish their business, and
so I think they're able to create a caseload, and
Derek and those guys help them learn how to run
(20:35):
the whole business thing, and then they have a chance
to kind of branch out on their own. On the
other side of the women's college basketball hoop loa that
was going on was Angel Reese. And it's interesting because
Angel Reese is bigger personality, I want to say, than
(20:58):
Caitlyn Clark, just more outward with her her approach to it.
You know, she's she's quoted says she's just unapologetically who
she is. But she also lost to Caitlin Clark in Iowa,
I think in the final four before he got to
the national championship, and in the in the press conference
(21:18):
after the game, she was quoted as saying, I just
try to stay strong. I've been attacked so many times,
death threats, I've been sexualized, I've been threatened. All this
has happened since I won the national championship, and I
have and then I haven't been happy since then. And
the thing that is amazing to me is that people
(21:40):
just totally missed the last line is I haven't been
happy since then, and they just went right to her
antics on the court. And I will say this, like,
if you take everything that someone does on the field
or the court competition and use that to define who
(22:02):
they are, then you're totally missing the mark. Because sometimes
you have to be you play the part to be
the part. You know, I fought a lot all the time.
If there was not a fight I was trying to
avoid on the football field, even if my teammates was
getting you know, getting into it with someone, I'm going
to find some way somehow to get a punch in
(22:25):
and and so in college, you know, I fought so
much in practice that they called my dad and was like, hey,
what's wrong with this dude? Like he fights all the time,
But I never got into a fight. Off the field.
I'm like the most approachable person you can imagine, Like
for a guy that at the time was you know,
six six and three hundred and some pounds, you know,
and and wore a face masters smash people in the
(22:47):
face all the time. Like off the field, I was
a totally different dude. I just knew on the field
I had to be a different persona to be able
to do the things that I needed to do to
get myself to a place where I needed to get
to to perform my best. And I think it was
my senior year in college. I think it was the
Washington Post did this particle NI. I think they titled
(23:07):
it The Gentle Giant because they couldn't have they could
not put together how I could be so aggressive and
dominating on the football field and be such a soft spoken,
easy going, want to make sure everybody's doing fine guy
off the field. And so it was just this idea
that like, man like it, even it wasn't like I
(23:28):
was going into character. It was just like the place
I had to go to to be able to do
the things I do. And so I could identify with
how Angel Reese went about her business because she was
putting herself into a mindset to play the way that
she can play and play her best basketball. But also
I think it was also a response to the stress
(23:49):
and the and the trauma of being, like she said,
attacked with death threats and been sexualized and all these
different kinds of things. I think that I think that
that was also a way that she protected herself, whereas
Caitlyn Clark kind of brought everything in kind of close
and tight and kind of put people around her to
kind of insulate her from a lot of the noise.
(24:10):
And I can't say that Angel Reese went to you know,
had a therapist or not. I didn't find that anywhere,
But that doesn't mean that she didn't. But Angel Reese
was like, well, I'm just I'm just gonna muscle up
to it all. And all of those are responses to
stress and trauma. Sometimes, like uh, the response to stress
and trauma is to drink too much. Sometimes it is
to party too hard, sometimes it is to drive too fast.
(24:33):
Sometimes it's to take super risky uh uh, take risks
that aren't aren't healthy that can can end the wrong
way sometimes. Like for me, I tend to kind of
just shut down and so like, But other people muscle up.
And I think Angel Reese was the type of person
that kind of muscles up. If you think about, uh,
(24:54):
you know, her upbringing in where she came from from,
you know, Baltimore, which is a tough city, uh, and
the things she had to do to survive there. It
kind of reminds me a little bit of Richard Sherman. Like.
People can say what you want about Richard Sherman and
all the talking and there's bravado and all that kind
of stuff, but man like, he probably needed that to
survive and to be able to come out of a
place like Compton, California. So like, I can't imagine that
(25:17):
Andrew Reese had to kind of muscle up and do
some things and you know, put your chest out and
be you know, this tough, dominant personality in order to
get to where she wanted to go. And the thing
that was really interesting to me is that after the
end of one of her quotes. She said, I'm still human.
And I think that's what people forget, is that we
(25:40):
project so much onto the athletes, especially now these young players,
like Caitlyn Clark said, eighteen to twenty two years old.
So there's still young people still developing, still trying to
figure out, you know, what they're doing in the world,
how to do it, and then also meeting all these
expectations their own and the unrealistic expectations of the noise outside.
(26:02):
But she said, I'm still human, and then she went
on to say, and it sucks, but I still wouldn't change.
And this is where I think like her, I think
she called herself in this vulnerable place, and then almost
on the fly, had to go, yeah, but like I
need like to protect that vulnerable me, I need to
muscle back up, like right on the fly. So she
(26:24):
went right from saying talking about the death threats and
not being happy and then saying, but I still wouldn't change.
I wouldn't change anything, and I would and I would
sit here and say, I'm unapologetically me. I'm going to
always leave that mark and be who I am and
stand on that. Hopefully the little girls that look up
(26:45):
to me hopefully I give them some type of inspiration.
Keep keep being who you are, don't back down, and
just be confident. And the thing is, there's so to
me that is such a loaded response and reflection to
what she had just talking about the vulnerable part of her.
And I think I remember even in that press conference,
(27:08):
like she kind of teared up a little bit, you know,
so there's a little if you want to call it,
a chink in the armor, just a little bit, and
she was talking about, you know, like I wasn't happy,
you know, so like she if she wasn't happy, that
mean that she wasn't enjoying all the win in and
all the things that she was doing, even though she
should have been able to. And she was one of
those eighteen to twenty two years old. And then she said,
(27:29):
I'm still I'm still human. And so some people criticize
her for her openness and her truth. And that's too
bad because regardless of how you view her attitude or approach,
if you were responding to what she was saying from
if she is saying that she's been through death threats,
she's been sexualized, and she's been threatened, and she has
(27:52):
not been happy. If your response to that is to
criticize and critique how she went about being who she was.
Then that is part of the problem to me, because
you get so caught up into this idea that sometimes
you just have to be who you have to be
in these areas of play so that you can perform
(28:14):
and be your best, and then you're using that to
say that's who that person is. And then because of that,
then she deserved to be attacked, She deserved the death threats,
she deserved to be sexualized, she deserved to be threatened.
If you're telling someone that they deserve those types of
things based on their demeanor and approach to participating in sports,
(28:40):
to me, then you become part of this whole mental
health problem because you are not seeing the humanity of
a person. You're not seeing, like Caitlin Clark said, a
young person who is trying to figure it out under
all of the eyeballs, And those were words from Caitlyn Clark,
(29:02):
under all of the eyeballs that were on her, like
how do I manage all of this? How do I
make sense of it so that I can still go
out and do what I have to do and also
still be a young person. And like and both of
these young ladies were carrying the load. I mean, like
Dawn Staley in South Carolina had an amazing season, undefeated
(29:23):
basketball season, completely totally, totally different starting five had lost
all five starters from the team that went to the
championship the year before and lost and then turned around
and created a whole new starting five and went undefeated
and nobody. It was almost like the fourth or fifth
story in women's basketball, and it was an amazing story.
(29:46):
But these two young ladies were carrying the weight of
it all, not because they were choosing to, but because
other people were putting it on their plate, and then
they had to deal with it. And then and then
people either could appreciate how they were dealing with it
because Caitlyn Clark was a little bit more subdued and
kept everything close to the cuff, or they criticized how
they were how they were dealing with it because Andrew
(30:08):
Reese was more big and bold and loud as a
way to kind of protect herself. And so I just
think it's important that that you hear that what both
of those young ladies said, that we are eighteen to
twenty two year year olds, and Angel said, we're still humans,
So let that just sink in for a bit. Like
(30:30):
they're like you might think of them as basketball players,
and somehow you remove the humanity from the athlete, and
I think that happens a lot, and especially in football,
they expect you to be this gladiator where you have
no emotions and you don't cry, and you don't bleed,
and you don't hurt, and you have to play through
pain and all this tough, macho stuff, And to me,
it makes it makes the mental health battle even tougher
(30:52):
and harder for these athletes. And so you can imagine
being a young person like they are and being superstars
rock stars uh at their inner college towns, and then
also been these in some respects international stars, had to
carry the weight of women's basketball on their shoulders and
(31:13):
then having to take all that comes with it that
they don't necessarily have control over, but it's contributing to
the noise around them, which then contributes to their mental
health and wellness, or or their difficulty with mental health
and wellness. So I will say to both of them
that it's tremendous that they were successful as they were
(31:36):
dealing with all of that stuff. Uh, they had to
have some type of uh support and therapy, whether the
therapy is like official with a therapist or you know,
sometimes therapy can just be shutting down everything and putting
some music on and and just laying it down, or
it can be going for a walk or going for
(31:57):
a swim or bike rider list whatever it is is
like just a way to kind of separate yourself from people.
That's that can be therapeutic as well. So two totally
different perspectives, or I want to say, different ways that
you can see how two totally different people and personalities
handled stress and trauma and expectation and unrealistic expectations and things,
(32:20):
and this big, huge conversation that was going on around
them but about them that they had to deal with,
and questions they had to answer, and things they had
to read on social media and all these different things
that they really didn't have play any role in other
than that they were the parties that that that were
playing to basketball, and I'm sure if you ask them,
they both just wanted to play basketball and be young people.
(32:42):
And so I just thought it was interesting that, you know,
just there's different ways you can look at that whole
scenario that went down, you know, from Caitlyn Clark started
this last year, this whole thing about reaching the score
and title and being the goat and her impact on
the game and all this other kind of stuff that
she's carrying with her. And then Angel Reese you know, uh,
(33:04):
you know, pointing to her finger with the national championship
and uh, and then kind of being the villain in
the story. Uh, but you know what the villain. The
villain has feelings to, the villain has a heart to.
The villain can be sad, the villain can be uh,
can be hurt, uh and all those different things. And
so I think Angel Reese, uh, like I said, when
(33:25):
you look at those two different quotes, because I think
these were in the same press conference where she talked
about being h not being happy and then went immediately
right to being unapologetically her and being strong and all
those kinds of things. I think she was trying to
protect her vulnerability because she probably understood the backlash that
was gonna come from her being vulnerable. And then Caitlyn
(33:47):
Clark really kind of brick keeping her her camp really
really tight, but also talking about the importance of to
the point where she felt like every college athlete should
have access to a sports colleges or to therapy, because
it's such a stressful time of your life. Like you
just imagine trying to do and be all the things
(34:09):
that that you know in an eighteen to twenty two
year old person is without all the basketball, without all
the attention, and all the media attention and all the
national attention. It's difficult in and of itself, and then
you layer all the other stuff on it. There's no
way on God's green earth that anybody would go through
that without having to have some help or some type
(34:31):
of therapy. Like I said, whether it's official therapy with
a therapist or some type of coping mechanism, it's just
you're just not equipped to handle all of that. And
so whoever says that they are, they would just be
lying because I guarantee you if you looked at their lives,
you could find ways that either they were suffering from
it or you know, like like I'll be honest, like
(34:51):
there were nights after I retired and just to stress
and trauma of this person that you used to be
basically like died and you have to grieve that part
of you. I would get up in the middle it
would get it would get so intense. I would get
up in the middle of the night and I had
this Dodge Ram SRT ten that had put I had
(35:16):
put all these supercharges and things on it, so it
had about close to two thousand horsepower. And I would
get up at two or three o'clock at night or
in the morning, and I'd see how fast I could
go to Olympia and back. So I would start in
Redmond Woodenville area and I would just get on four
or five and then hit five south and I'm just
I would go as fast as I could possibly go.
(35:37):
And I have every excuse in my mind ready to
tell the police officers if I got pulled over, and
I just try to go down there as discuss. I
needed the adrenaline rush to kind of relieve me of
the pressure that I was feeling about who am I,
Where am I going? What's next? Like? Who am I?
Without football? All these different kinds of things. So I
can't imagine being eighteen to twenty two years old and
you're just trying to figure out life. You're trying to
(35:58):
figure out like you know, even you know, I think
the kids still go to the classes nowadays, so you
still you still trying to do college work and assignments
and things. I think they take a lot of This
is what I just learned too. And and my son
at Portland State kind of I would call him and
be like, dude, why are you Why are you not
in class? So go dad, I take the class online.
Say well why do we go to college? Why are
(36:20):
we paying room on board? Now? If all the classes
are online, you don't ever have to go to a classroom.
But but that's a that's another story. But but I
can't imagine you're trying to get all that stuff done
and then trying to be the best teammate you can be,
trying to be the best you know, daughter, you know, son, brother, sister,
whatever it is that you're trying to be, trying to
(36:40):
have a social life, trying to be the best basketball
player you can be, and then dealing with all this
other stuff that gets layered on top. There's just no
way that you that you can get through all of
that without having some type of coping mechanism. And I
think with these two players, you saw how very different
the coping skills were or the mechanism they use. But
(37:01):
they were ways to protect themselves and get through all
of that stuff. So I noted it was a lot,
but I think that the way that these two responded
to the stress and trauma and the unfair pressure and
the unrealistic expectations of it all in a way that
(37:22):
they felt would protect themselves, that's what they did. And
to me, that is both are signs that therapy and
sports psychologists and all these different things are important. That's
why it's vital. That's why in nineteen forty nine they
came up with the Mental Health Awareness muff because they
(37:44):
were concerned and wanted to bring attention to the mental
health and wellness of American lives and celebrating the healing
of that. And so it's no different today. Those two,
to me should be applauded for how they went about it.
And you can decide whether you like one or the other,
(38:05):
or you think, you know, Caitlyn is the best basketball
player or not, and all that kind of stuff, that's
that's all cool. I was more concerned about just how
they're managing all of that stuff, and how they're managing
like even the the the thrills of the wind and
the agony of the defeat, and then and then and
then laying it all with all this other kind of stuff. Man,
(38:25):
it was it cannot have been the most pleasant experience,
even though they were doing amazing, great things because they
probably had to be on all the time. But I
just wanted to try to keep it kind of current
and just kind of help you see that how mental
health and wellness plays a part and just about everything
and every aspect of your life, and and in different ways,
(38:48):
and it can be seen and viewed and and people
can deal with it and process it different ways, and
therapy can look different for different people, and protecting yourself
from all the noise can look different from different from uh,
you know, from from two totally different people, but in
all the same they both were dealing with uh I
(39:09):
don't I don't want to say it's like a mental illness,
but they were concerned about their mental health in a
way that they came up with ways to protect themselves.
As we started to show out again that May is
Mental Health Awareness Month, and so I tried to find
some data to kind of just speak to some of
(39:31):
the mental health things in our country, really, and what
I found is that I'm gonna just read some of
these off because I couldn't memorize them all. And this
is current to twenty twenty four that fifty seven point
eight million adults live with some form of mental illness
(39:52):
and can and it can vary from individuals who can
perform daily task and work with mental illness to some
people who qualify for disability due to their mental health.
So fifty seven point eight million people adults. That is
so a lot of the adults that are saying that, hey,
(40:13):
you need to tough it out and back in my day,
this is how we did it, and all this other
kind of stuff. They are part of the fifty seven
point eight million that are suffering, and whether they are
willing to acknowledge it or not, that's what's happening. And
I'm hoping that there are people in their lives that
care enough that can reach out to them, show up
for them, and point them in the right direction to
(40:34):
get the help that they need. Anxiety disorders are the
most common mental illness. And I'll be honest with you
today I got about a mile from here and I
just could not breathe. I was just having an anxiety attacked.
There's some things that I need to deal with in
(40:57):
my life, and they just kind of all jumped on
my back when I got a mile from here. And
so actually when I called NASA, the producer said, I
just pulled up. I had been sitting outside for a
few minutes in my car just trying to breathe because
I could not get I couldn't get an air past
my chest, like my chest was really really tight. And
anxiety is one of those things that I that I
(41:19):
deal with, and so I had to like really work
hard at some of the skills, the breathing techniques to
kind of been able to put some things down so
that I can get myself to a place where I
could walk through the door. And NASA didn't think I
was having a heart attack and that I wasn't sweating
so hard that I needed that I needed a change
of clothing. And then the next thing is that women
(41:41):
are more likely than men to experience depression. Seventeen percent
of adolescence between the ages of twelve and seventeen experienced
a major depressive episode. And I think this is interesting
because I think our young people are under a well
I don't think I know they're under a tack through
social media, through what the expectations are that they should
(42:06):
be how they are based on the click of a
like or not like or what have you. You're either
popular or you're not popular. You see people that are
doing what seems like amazing things, traveling the world, taking pictures,
looking like their lives are just incredible, and you're expecting
that because your life isn't that that something is wrong
(42:27):
with you, even though a lot of those pictures and
a lot of things that people are doing are just
so superficial in and of themselves that the pressure that
is I've read this article, i want to say, like
a couple of years ago, and it's talking about early
childhood development, and it talked about years ago that a
(42:47):
young person would look to an adult in their life,
whether it was a teacher, a parent, a neighbor, or whatever.
They would look to an adult in their life for
validation to that they knew that like whatever they were doing,
where they succeeded or fail, that person said, hey, sure,
you know, you'll be creative, confessional key, and that helped
(43:11):
this young person along well. In today's society, those same
young people look to other young people for that validation.
And if you think about that, where are they look
into these other young people all over social media. If
you look at social media, you're hot one day, you're cold,
the next day. You're the greatest thing on the face
of the earth. One minute, you're the worst person on
(43:33):
the face of earth. The next minute. The clothes you
wear one second, it gets a million likes. Those same
clothes the next day don't get any likes. And so
you judge your whole validation and well being on likes
and clicks and what is popular and what's not popular.
So your emotions are up and down. So, of course,
seventeen percent of adolescents between twelve and seventeen experienced a
(43:56):
major depressive order, like absolutely, that's kind of happened. Thirty
three percent of adults with mental illness also have a
substance use disorder. So sometimes the drinking or the drugging,
or you know, whatever substance you're using is a result
of the mental illness that you're having. And so some
people may go like, well, we need to address the
(44:19):
substance abuse, which is yes, you do, but the root
of it isn't the substance abuse, it's the mental illness.
And so you can you can get them to stop
drinking to stop drugging, But if the mental illness isn't address,
then they're going to go back to doing those. If
the mental illness isn't address, you don't have the coping
skills and the techniques that you need to keep you
from going back to the bottle or to the pill
(44:40):
or to the whatever it is you know, drug that
you use. Almost four times as many men commit suicide
as women. And so to me, this is interesting because
we live in a culture, in a society where especially
like our guys that are my age now, like middle
aged dudes and either you know, forty to sixty five
(45:03):
years old, think that our way of growing up was
the best way to grow up and you had to
be tough and physical, and you couldn't show emotions and
you can't cry and all these other kind of things,
and people can't have feelings and feelings aren't real and
all that kind of stuff. But almost four times as
many men commit suicide as women. So if you think
about some of these numbers, and you if you if
(45:24):
you hear these numbers, and I got these from the MHA,
the Mental Health Awareness Association, if you hear these numbers,
and you can still justify somehow that mental health isn't real,
or that that that means that you're soft, or that
it means you're not tough, or or you need to
(45:46):
live the way you lived in yester year and you
know some other time then man, like you were really
barking up the wrong tree, and you are maybe leading
and guiding people to making some really bad decisions. Mental
health is a real thing. It's not something imagined. It's
not something that's trivial. Its real and to be taken seriously.
(46:07):
It's not about being weak or soft. It's not about
we were tougher in my day. And like I said,
to be honest and blunt about it. Those that say
that are part of the fifty eight million adults that
suffer and part of the group of men that commit
suicide at the rate four times of women. If there
are people in your life that are suffering, show up
(46:30):
for them. I heard it. I was at a I'm
actually doing a talk for a keynote for Evergreen Hospital
in October for their hospice care and the the theme
of my of my talk is the power of showing up.
And if you not that someone is suffering and you
(46:54):
can show up for the humanity of that person, regardless
of what their life looks like, regardless of how they act,
regardless of the things they've done or haven't done, whether
you like the way they do it or don't like
the way they do it, If they are suffering, it's
important that you show up for the humanity of who
they are because sometimes the things that the things that
we see outurardly is a result of the way that
(47:14):
they're feeling inwardly, and so it's best to show up
and not be needed than to not show up and
lose a soul. Like I have friends in my life
that I have a circle of maybe like four or
five guys, and they can call me out on anything
at any time, in any situation, because I would rather
(47:36):
them call me out if they if they think that
I'm walking towards the edge of a cliff and I'm
about to fall off, and they call me out on
it and they're wrong, I would rather that happen than
for them to not call me out and I just
walk right off the cliff. And so I give them
permission just to do that, and I don't take it personally.
I don't if they need more information to have a
(47:57):
better understanding of what's happening in my life. Give them
more information. But it's better to show up than to
not show up, even if even if you're what you're
showing up for could be the wrong thing, or you
don't have all the information. Like I said before, I
suffer from anxiety and a depression and panic attacks. But
I've acquired skills and I've surrounded myself with people that
(48:18):
can help me, that can help me deal with it.
And I can't tell you that you know that every
day and every time it happens that I have instant success. Nope,
Sometimes I'm just stuck for a couple of days. But
I know that I'm gonna be okay, and I know
that I have people that are checking in on me.
(48:39):
I know what I have people that have come alongside me.
I know I have people that will show up for me,
and I cannot be more appreciative and grateful and thankful
that they do. I don't know that I'd be sitting
here in this chair having this conversation with you guys
had people not shown up for me and the Sea Hawks.
(49:02):
Like I said before, the guys on our broadcast team
NASA and Bump and Paul and Brian and Turbo and
Truefont and Babino, all those guys have shown up for
me in some form of fashion through this journey with me,
like the Seahawks, you know, helping me do this podcast
and give me the space to do it. And then,
like I talked about earlier, Derek and Jessica with the
(49:23):
Mindful Therapy group have really shown up for me in
ways that man, I just can't thank them enough for
because I really needed it and I didn't know what
to do with who to turn to, and those people
really showed up. So check in on your people, and
sometimes those that seem the happiest and like they have
it the most together are the ones that are suffering
(49:45):
the most, because those sometimes responses to the stress and
the trauma and the hard times is to make it
look like I promise you the day before, like I
want to say, maybe two years now, the day before,
for I just fell apart on my couch crying and
didn't know what to do. If you had asked anybody
(50:06):
in my life like how's Ray doing, they'd have been like,
this dude is the happiest dude ever. Like this dude
shows up for everybody. He shows up with a smile
on his face. You know, he runs late to the
broadcast shows sometimes, but he gets there and and and
I'm you know, I work hard, I show up for
the people I work for and all that kind of stuff,
(50:26):
But man, I was suffering in silence. And there are
so many of us that are suffering and silence. So
even though yes, show up for the people that you
can visibly see that they're suffering. But also I think
I heard someone say today, bug like bug the people
to a fault to make like even if they get
mad at you. And and because sometimes it's the people
(50:49):
that has the biggest smile, have the biggest Albert personality,
seems like they have life in order and everything's going right.
Sometimes those are the people that are suffering the most.
So make sure that you check in on your people,
especially the ones that seem like they have it going well.
And then, like we end every show, there are three
things to remember. Number one, it's okay to not be okay.
(51:13):
Number two, if you're having a mental health crisis, reach
out to your medical provider for assistance and guidance. If
you just need someone to talk to, try the m
h A warm lines. And I know my Southern accent
makes it sounds like I'm saying worm, but I'm saying
warm w A R M lines. A warm line is
a phone number you can call to have a conversation
(51:35):
with someone someone who can provide support during hard times.
The lines are staffed by trained peers who have been
through their own mental health struggles and know what it's
like to need help. Go to warmline dot org, select
your state and you will see a list of numbers
to call. They're free and confidential. If it's a more
serious situation where you are concerned about your safety and
(51:59):
or you're having thoughts about suicide, doal nine eight eight
to reach a suicide and crisis lifeline and number three
if you need help and you ask for help, you're
operating from a position of power. So, like I said, again, man,
thank you guys for tuning in, Thank you guys for listening.
Been away for a little bit, but we're about to
(52:19):
get back on the grind. Hopefully next episode we'll have
Derek Crane, who's the founder of the Mindful Therapy Group
on the show. And like we always ended, this is
big Ray, Big Raise Garage Grind, Mental Health Edition Peace
and I'm Out
You're listening to Big Raised Garage Grind. I want to
bring awareness and my voice to something that's meaningful and
purchasel more than just who's the best football player, who's
the best football team? The intersection between life, football and
mental health. When you need help and you ask for help,
you're operating from a position of power. When you need
(00:21):
help and you don't ask for help, that's the weakness.
Now here's your host, Seahawk's Legend, Ray Roberts. What is up? Fan?
Welcome back to Big Raise Garage Grinme Mental Health Edition,
brought to you by the Mindful Therapy Group. And man,
it's been a long time since we've been back in
the studio. The season ended, had some other things that
(00:42):
were going on and happening that kind of slowed us
down a little bit. But hey, we're still hanging in
there doing what we do and making things happen. And
so we're back in here today to record another episode
a Big Raise Garage Grind Mental Health Edition. And before
I get started, I just wanted to also just give
a shout out to some people that have become really
(01:03):
good friends of mine. So, you know, we started a
podcast what maybe almost like a year ago or so,
just just not quite a year ago. And since then,
I've become really good friends with Derek and Jessica Crane,
who are the founders of the Mindful Therapy Group. And
let me just say this, they are unbelievably kind, caring,
(01:27):
and really loving individuals. They've invited me to different events
and things that they've hosted. They've invited me to their
vacation home down in Hook Canal. Derek checks in on
me a lot. We talk a lot, We talk about
a lot of different things. We share love for hip
hop and rap music, so we text each other music
(01:49):
back and forth. But Derek has been one of my
biggest supporters and very meaningful conversations and relationship that we've developed.
We've we've we've just had a really good time, like
figuring out this podcast, figuring out how to make an
impact in the lives of people with with around mental
(02:09):
health services and things, and and so it's just been
They're just a tremendous couple to be around. Uh. They
started this Mindful Therapy Group from the ground up and
has really built it out to be something pretty spectacular
with I think they just opened an office in Tempe Arizona.
They haven't. They have a couple offices here in the
(02:31):
Pacific Northwest and they represent other therapists, and so I
just want to give them a big shout out, man,
because I didn't know where this was going to go,
you know, when we first started, and we all sitting
in the room together and trying to figure out what
it is and what it's not and what we want
to do with it, and me trying to get to know,
you know, who they were, and man, it's just a
friendship has just grown out of it that that I
(02:54):
value quite quite quite a bit. And so hopefully in
the next episode I will get to interview Derek and
we can hear his story and how he you know,
came to you know, to create this, this organization that
represents and gives a lot of resources to a lot
of people that need it. And then his wife, Jessica,
(03:16):
is just as incredible and a little bit more seems
a little more quiet than Derek, but two tremendous individuals
that I just want to give a shout out to
for supporting me. They've done a really good job in
doing that. And so but to get on to keep
on moving this month is a mental health awareness month,
(03:37):
and he got me wondering, like, why this month, out
of all the months in the year, why this month?
And if my research is correct, I couldn't really find
why they picked us specific month. But it was established
in nineteen forty nine by the MHA, the Mental Health
Mental Health of America, and back then it was known
as the National Association for Mental Health. And the thing
(04:02):
that was shocking to me is that that it was
established in nineteen forty nine, and I feel like I've
just heard about it in the last three or four years,
and maybe that's because of my own mental health journey,
but it didn't seem to be as celebrated and seen,
you know, on different screens and things up until the
last few years ago. So I thought it was something
(04:23):
that was like a really recent established awareness month. But
it was established in nineteen forty nine to increase the
awareness of the importance of mental health and wellness in
American lives and to celebrate recovery from mental illness. So
I'm not exactly sure what triggered it, but it seems
(04:45):
like back then there must have been an increase in
mental illness that doctors were seeing at the time I
don't know how prevalent the psychology world was, but I
would have mad imagine that just in the regular hospital
general doctors, practitioners, that they were coming across this stuff,
(05:08):
and then as they started trying to find ways to
service it, that there came a point where they felt
like it was big enough and important enough to bring
an awareness to. So it's really interesting that it seems
like this thing has like mental health and the importance
of mental health and the focus on mental health has
really cranked up. It was cranking up a little bit
(05:28):
before the pandemic, and then after the pandemic, or through
the pandemic, and after the pandemic, it has really ramped
up to almost what you feel like like this is
a new thing that we're doing, but it actually has
been celebrated or highlighted, if you want to call it that,
since nineteen forty nine a by the Mental Health by
(05:50):
Mental Health of America, And so to me, it's just
another indication that mental health, it's a plays a vital
role in our overall health and well being. Just like
if you were going to go to the gym and
work out, or go outside and go for a walk,
or if you had a cold, or if you had
some other illness where you had to go to the
doctor to be treated. Mental health and wellness is no different.
(06:12):
And so speaking of that, you know, I try to
keep make some of the topics that we talk about
on here as current as I possibly can. And so
I'm a little bit behind the eight ball, but I
think it's still fresh enough to have a conversation or
just a little short little bit about it. But I
couldn't help but wonder throughout the whole second half of
(06:36):
the women's college basketball season and then into the NCAA
tournament just the ways that those young women were taking
care of their mental health. And two people in particular,
which you know, were kind of like the polarizing players
(07:00):
that kind of uh brought a lot of attention to
the game, uh and then also created the a lot
of the noise around the game, and that is Caitlyn
Clark of Iowa and Angel Reese of l s U.
And I thought it was interesting because I wanted to see.
I did some research to kind of see how either
(07:22):
one of them mentioned anything about mental health, and I
was surprised to see that one of the very first
articles that I that was on the Google list was
about Caitlyn Clark, and you know you can This isn't
an argument about if Kaitlyn Clark was is the is
the goat of all time? And all that other kind
of stuff, like you know, that's for other people to decide.
(07:45):
And and that was also part of what created a
lot of the noise around this season, was the was
the one side saying that that she's the goat of
all the best of all time and she's the goat,
and the other others others saying like, well, she's a
scoring champ and she does some cool stuff, but she's
not the greatest of all times. She doesn't have championships
all this other kind of stuff. And then how do
(08:06):
you judge a champion the greatest of all time if
you don't have championships and this, that and the other thing.
So this is not that conversation, but I thought it
was interesting that the pressure to perform and win and
represent an entire community of your college town and of
(08:28):
women basketball players was just outright tremendous and sometimes ridiculous
to me, just the pressure that was generated and the
noise that is generated not by the players but by
the people around it around the game and around them,
And to me sometimes that is that noise is the
(08:54):
most damaging noise of it all, because it's so much
about it that the players have no control over, even
though they're the center of the conversations. And then when
they don't show up or if they don't know respond
in a certain way, then either the supporters are going
to in hard on them or the haters are going
(09:14):
in hard on them. So it's almost like a no
win situation. If you play up to what you think
you can play, then your supporters are all for you
and the haters hate you. But if you play down
to it, then the haters are like hate more and
the supporters are kind of talking down to you. So
it was just to me, it was tremendous all the
news coverage, like wanting to know all these different things
(09:36):
about them and what they were doing and how they
were doing it. And to me, it reminded me of
when I took a job with the University Virginia, I
want to say twenty ten ish, and at the same time,
this guy Jim Bowman, who was a sports psychologist, and
(09:57):
he's here in town two and he was at why
State at the time. He's a sports psychologist for the
athletic department for the Washington State Cougars, and he took
this job to be the sports psychologist for University of
Virginia Athletic department. And we started on the exact same week.
I was a life skills director and Jim was the
(10:17):
sports psychologist. And within the very first week, Jim had
so many caseloads that they had to hire two more
psychologists under him to help him handle the caseload. And
the thing that he talked about the most was this
pressure to perform and to be on twenty four hours
(10:40):
a day. So you had to be the perfect student,
you had to be the perfect citizen in the community
and on campus or grounds, and you also had to
be the very best perfect player and win. Not just
show up and work hard, but the pressure to win
was tremendous. And so these young people were having a really,
really hard time dealing with this, and so I was
(11:02):
just curious to see how Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese,
you know, dealt with with it, because man, it it
had gotten too a place that it was hard to
enjoy the games because of all the build up and
the talk moving up to the game, if you on
social media had to kind of you know, cipher through
all of that stuff, all the different sports stations that
(11:25):
were kind of pushing their agenda and trying to make
this this rivalry, whether they're planning to each other or not,
even bigger than it needed to be. And man, it
just to me, it would just I don't know how
we could not take a toll on an athlete nowadays.
And so you can say, hey, well just block it
out or don't respond to it or don't read it
(11:47):
or whatever, but how can you, like, on every single platform,
did you can imagine that's all they were talking about,
whether it was Twitter, Face, Facebook, Instagram, uh, you know,
on TV, streaming, like every every possible place that you
could imagine having some type of communication with the public.
This conversation was happening. And then so much pressure has
(12:10):
been put on both players, uh, you know, to to
either to show up and perform or there was so
much hate and visceral and and disrespect coming at the
at the players that they themselves I don't think warranted,
you know. And uh, and so I thought it was
really interesting and what I found was that they had
two totally different approaches to it, and I think both
(12:33):
of them are responses to you know, like this type
of stress in some cases it can be traumatizing. UH.
And so I think they that they both had what
they felt were appropriate responses. And if you think of
Kaitlyn Clark, Caitlyn didn't ever seem to openly respond to
(12:53):
a lot of the noise that was going on. It
seemed like she kind of kept her her camp tight,
and she kept her comments short and just to the point,
and then she just played basketball, was with her teammates
and with her family. That's what it appeared like appeared
to me. And people may say, like, well, you know,
she's very calm and and you know, mature, and so
(13:16):
that was a mature way to handle it. But also
that could also be a response distress and trauma is
to kind of tighten your ship and like keep things
close to the cuff and not let people in and
protect your you kind of protect yourself with your family
and with your team and with with your support group.
And what I found is is that Caitlin is a
(13:38):
proponent of therapy and she works with sports psychologists and UH,
and something she found, UH, I think I guess the
quote says it was something she found super helpful throughout
her time at Iowa, and the quote that she had was, uh,
(13:58):
that should be normal for college student athletes. It should
be normal for college student athletes to engage their therapists
and sports psychologists on their staff, and most teams do
have them now, and she acknowledged that therapy can play
can be a place to share both the letdowns and
the great things that happen along the way. And I
(14:20):
think that's important because some people think that going to
therapy and having these mental health crises or situations is
all about negative things and things that fall apart and
things aren't going your way, or negative feelings that you have.
But sometimes you have to figure out how to handle
the success too, because that can also bring more stress
and more expectations, which she was definitely under. And then
(14:44):
she goes on to say, it's such a stressful period
of your life. You're eighteen to twenty two years old
and trying to figure out which way your life's going,
which way your life is going to go, while so
many eyeballs are on you, and it can be difficult
at times. And so I don't know that had you
not read this quote or maybe if this was like
(15:07):
a live feet or something, if you would ever have
known that about Caitlyn Clark, because she always seemed to
be so cool, calm and collected. But she's telling you
that even with all the success that she was having
and with all the support that she was having that
she was she had a tough time dealing with all
the eyeballs on her. Like she just wanted to go
(15:27):
play basketball. She wanted to go win a national championship.
That was a lot the only thing that she had
not accomplished. She was the scoring leader, and I think
she was also like the all times assist leader, and
then she was the all time just basketball college basketball
and general scoring leader, so she was all time women
scored and just the all time score and then she
was also the is the assist leader. But she had
(15:51):
fallen short with the national championship. So I would imagine
that those were the things that were on her mind.
Was trying to help her team get to that place,
and so she seems to have surrounded herself with the
right people and to try to maintain her space and
(16:12):
help her manage things. Honestly, I was in Indianapolis. I
want to say, two weeks ago, two or three weeks ago,
like right after the w NBA draft, there was there
for special Olympics. We were having some meetings there and
we're actually staying in the same hotel as Caitlyn Clark.
And it was interesting because she and her mom and
(16:33):
I think it I don't know if it's a brother
or a boyfriend or something, but it was she and
her mom and a male They would post up right
outside our conference room every day on the second floor
in the corner of this hotel, so you know that
she is keeping things tight. She it wasn't like she
(16:56):
was being stand offish or wasn't to engage people, but
you can tell that she was trying to keep a
space distance from people so that she can be in
a safe place to kind of be who she needed
to be and do the things that she needed to
excuse me, do the things that she needed to do.
And it's really funny though, because a lot of people
(17:20):
on our team, we probably had maybe forty people there,
and all forty people saw her, and thirty nine of
us was so in alle we couldn't even like get
get to our meetings and everyone. It was interesting because
if you have young kids, you know that, like when
(17:43):
you have sweets and candy and stuff like that around
and it's sitting like on a table and you can
just see them just staring at it, like and their
hands are just like right here, and like every time
you look, their hands are getting a little bit closer.
They just can't. They just want to grab this food
and this candy so bad. That's what it was like
watching these adults walk past Caitlyn Clark. They wanted to
(18:05):
say hello, they wanted to make eye contact, they wanted
to take a picture, they wanted to get an autograph,
but they were and they were trying so hard. You
could see everything in there being like trying not to
even like do anything to disrupt the the atmosphere around
Caitlyn with here and a mom sitting in these two chairs.
It was really, uh really kind of funny to watch
(18:26):
and uh and just watch people just uh really uh
get to that that kid place in their demeanor around her.
And so it was pretty cool that, you know, Caitlyn
kept her cool. She she and her mom kept showing
up to the same spot and we had our people
walking by her and people didn't bother her. But it
kind of gave me just a little peek into, you know,
(18:47):
the the what she deals with and in a place where, uh,
this is a big, huge hotel and she and her
mom had found this little corner of a of the
hotel to kind of hide out. And then we had
our big special Olympic meetings right there next to her,
but we did a good job of keeping our distance.
But to me, it just speaks to the people that
she has around her and the way that she approached
(19:08):
this whole idea around mental health and all this stress
and pressure and things that she's under. And as we're
talking about the mental health stuff, and we talked a
little bit earlier about Derek and Jessica Crane, who started
the Mindful Therapy Group. The Mindful Therapy Group, based in
the Pacific Northwest, is a diverse group of qualified mental
(19:29):
health providers offering both in person and virtual care, whether
it's talk therapy or medication management. You can book your
first visit within one week. Visit Mindful Theapygroup dot com
to start your journey to better mental health today. And
like I said earlier, just getting to know Derek and Jessica, man,
they're amazing people. And this is an amazing group. They
(19:52):
do a really good job of matching individuals with therapists
that can serve their needs. And you know, like I said,
you've said this before, sometimes this is not the first
therapist you come across. You may have to go through
a couple of them to kind of get the person
that becomes that is your person that you kind of
connect with. And they do a really good job of
doing a lot of that pre work before they start
(20:14):
to connect you with a therapist from their team. And
they also do a good job of supporting those therapists.
I think one of the things they do is they
help beginning therapists or young therapists establish their business, and
so I think they're able to create a caseload, and
Derek and those guys help them learn how to run
(20:35):
the whole business thing, and then they have a chance
to kind of branch out on their own. On the
other side of the women's college basketball hoop loa that
was going on was Angel Reese. And it's interesting because
Angel Reese is bigger personality, I want to say, than
(20:58):
Caitlyn Clark, just more outward with her her approach to it.
You know, she's she's quoted says she's just unapologetically who
she is. But she also lost to Caitlin Clark in Iowa,
I think in the final four before he got to
the national championship, and in the in the press conference
(21:18):
after the game, she was quoted as saying, I just
try to stay strong. I've been attacked so many times,
death threats, I've been sexualized, I've been threatened. All this
has happened since I won the national championship, and I
have and then I haven't been happy since then. And
the thing that is amazing to me is that people
(21:40):
just totally missed the last line is I haven't been
happy since then, and they just went right to her
antics on the court. And I will say this, like,
if you take everything that someone does on the field
or the court competition and use that to define who
(22:02):
they are, then you're totally missing the mark. Because sometimes
you have to be you play the part to be
the part. You know, I fought a lot all the time.
If there was not a fight I was trying to
avoid on the football field, even if my teammates was
getting you know, getting into it with someone, I'm going
to find some way somehow to get a punch in
(22:25):
and and so in college, you know, I fought so
much in practice that they called my dad and was like, hey,
what's wrong with this dude? Like he fights all the time,
But I never got into a fight. Off the field.
I'm like the most approachable person you can imagine, Like
for a guy that at the time was you know,
six six and three hundred and some pounds, you know,
and and wore a face masters smash people in the
(22:47):
face all the time. Like off the field, I was
a totally different dude. I just knew on the field
I had to be a different persona to be able
to do the things that I needed to do to
get myself to a place where I needed to get
to to perform my best. And I think it was
my senior year in college. I think it was the
Washington Post did this particle NI. I think they titled
(23:07):
it The Gentle Giant because they couldn't have they could
not put together how I could be so aggressive and
dominating on the football field and be such a soft spoken,
easy going, want to make sure everybody's doing fine guy
off the field. And so it was just this idea
that like, man like it, even it wasn't like I
(23:28):
was going into character. It was just like the place
I had to go to to be able to do
the things I do. And so I could identify with
how Angel Reese went about her business because she was
putting herself into a mindset to play the way that
she can play and play her best basketball. But also
I think it was also a response to the stress
(23:49):
and the and the trauma of being, like she said,
attacked with death threats and been sexualized and all these
different kinds of things. I think that I think that
that was also a way that she protected herself, whereas
Caitlyn Clark kind of brought everything in kind of close
and tight and kind of put people around her to
kind of insulate her from a lot of the noise.
(24:10):
And I can't say that Angel Reese went to you know,
had a therapist or not. I didn't find that anywhere,
But that doesn't mean that she didn't. But Angel Reese
was like, well, I'm just I'm just gonna muscle up
to it all. And all of those are responses to
stress and trauma. Sometimes, like uh, the response to stress
and trauma is to drink too much. Sometimes it is
to party too hard, sometimes it is to drive too fast.
(24:33):
Sometimes it's to take super risky uh uh, take risks
that aren't aren't healthy that can can end the wrong
way sometimes. Like for me, I tend to kind of
just shut down and so like, But other people muscle up.
And I think Angel Reese was the type of person
that kind of muscles up. If you think about, uh,
(24:54):
you know, her upbringing in where she came from from,
you know, Baltimore, which is a tough city, uh, and
the things she had to do to survive there. It
kind of reminds me a little bit of Richard Sherman. Like.
People can say what you want about Richard Sherman and
all the talking and there's bravado and all that kind
of stuff, but man like, he probably needed that to
survive and to be able to come out of a
place like Compton, California. So like, I can't imagine that
(25:17):
Andrew Reese had to kind of muscle up and do
some things and you know, put your chest out and
be you know, this tough, dominant personality in order to
get to where she wanted to go. And the thing
that was really interesting to me is that after the
end of one of her quotes. She said, I'm still human.
And I think that's what people forget, is that we
(25:40):
project so much onto the athletes, especially now these young players,
like Caitlyn Clark said, eighteen to twenty two years old.
So there's still young people still developing, still trying to
figure out, you know, what they're doing in the world,
how to do it, and then also meeting all these
expectations their own and the unrealistic expectations of the noise outside.
(26:02):
But she said, I'm still human, and then she went
on to say, and it sucks, but I still wouldn't change.
And this is where I think like her, I think
she called herself in this vulnerable place, and then almost
on the fly, had to go, yeah, but like I
need like to protect that vulnerable me, I need to
muscle back up, like right on the fly. So she
(26:24):
went right from saying talking about the death threats and
not being happy and then saying, but I still wouldn't change.
I wouldn't change anything, and I would and I would
sit here and say, I'm unapologetically me. I'm going to
always leave that mark and be who I am and
stand on that. Hopefully the little girls that look up
(26:45):
to me hopefully I give them some type of inspiration.
Keep keep being who you are, don't back down, and
just be confident. And the thing is, there's so to
me that is such a loaded response and reflection to
what she had just talking about the vulnerable part of her.
And I think I remember even in that press conference,
(27:08):
like she kind of teared up a little bit, you know,
so there's a little if you want to call it,
a chink in the armor, just a little bit, and
she was talking about, you know, like I wasn't happy,
you know, so like she if she wasn't happy, that
mean that she wasn't enjoying all the win in and
all the things that she was doing, even though she
should have been able to. And she was one of
those eighteen to twenty two years old. And then she said,
(27:29):
I'm still I'm still human. And so some people criticize
her for her openness and her truth. And that's too
bad because regardless of how you view her attitude or approach,
if you were responding to what she was saying from
if she is saying that she's been through death threats,
she's been sexualized, and she's been threatened, and she has
(27:52):
not been happy. If your response to that is to
criticize and critique how she went about being who she was.
Then that is part of the problem to me, because
you get so caught up into this idea that sometimes
you just have to be who you have to be
in these areas of play so that you can perform
(28:14):
and be your best, and then you're using that to
say that's who that person is. And then because of that,
then she deserved to be attacked, She deserved the death threats,
she deserved to be sexualized, she deserved to be threatened.
If you're telling someone that they deserve those types of
things based on their demeanor and approach to participating in sports,
(28:40):
to me, then you become part of this whole mental
health problem because you are not seeing the humanity of
a person. You're not seeing, like Caitlin Clark said, a
young person who is trying to figure it out under
all of the eyeballs, And those were words from Caitlyn Clark,
(29:02):
under all of the eyeballs that were on her, like
how do I manage all of this? How do I
make sense of it so that I can still go
out and do what I have to do and also
still be a young person. And like and both of
these young ladies were carrying the load. I mean, like
Dawn Staley in South Carolina had an amazing season, undefeated
(29:23):
basketball season, completely totally, totally different starting five had lost
all five starters from the team that went to the
championship the year before and lost and then turned around
and created a whole new starting five and went undefeated
and nobody. It was almost like the fourth or fifth
story in women's basketball, and it was an amazing story.
(29:46):
But these two young ladies were carrying the weight of
it all, not because they were choosing to, but because
other people were putting it on their plate, and then
they had to deal with it. And then and then
people either could appreciate how they were dealing with it
because Caitlyn Clark was a little bit more subdued and
kept everything close to the cuff, or they criticized how
they were how they were dealing with it because Andrew
(30:08):
Reese was more big and bold and loud as a
way to kind of protect herself. And so I just
think it's important that that you hear that what both
of those young ladies said, that we are eighteen to
twenty two year year olds, and Angel said, we're still humans,
So let that just sink in for a bit. Like
(30:30):
they're like you might think of them as basketball players,
and somehow you remove the humanity from the athlete, and
I think that happens a lot, and especially in football,
they expect you to be this gladiator where you have
no emotions and you don't cry, and you don't bleed,
and you don't hurt, and you have to play through
pain and all this tough, macho stuff, And to me,
it makes it makes the mental health battle even tougher
(30:52):
and harder for these athletes. And so you can imagine
being a young person like they are and being superstars
rock stars uh at their inner college towns, and then
also been these in some respects international stars, had to
carry the weight of women's basketball on their shoulders and
(31:13):
then having to take all that comes with it that
they don't necessarily have control over, but it's contributing to
the noise around them, which then contributes to their mental
health and wellness, or or their difficulty with mental health
and wellness. So I will say to both of them
that it's tremendous that they were successful as they were
(31:36):
dealing with all of that stuff. Uh, they had to
have some type of uh support and therapy, whether the
therapy is like official with a therapist or you know,
sometimes therapy can just be shutting down everything and putting
some music on and and just laying it down, or
it can be going for a walk or going for
(31:57):
a swim or bike rider list whatever it is is
like just a way to kind of separate yourself from people.
That's that can be therapeutic as well. So two totally
different perspectives, or I want to say, different ways that
you can see how two totally different people and personalities
handled stress and trauma and expectation and unrealistic expectations and things,
(32:20):
and this big, huge conversation that was going on around
them but about them that they had to deal with,
and questions they had to answer, and things they had
to read on social media and all these different things
that they really didn't have play any role in other
than that they were the parties that that that were
playing to basketball, and I'm sure if you ask them,
they both just wanted to play basketball and be young people.
(32:42):
And so I just thought it was interesting that, you know,
just there's different ways you can look at that whole
scenario that went down, you know, from Caitlyn Clark started
this last year, this whole thing about reaching the score
and title and being the goat and her impact on
the game and all this other kind of stuff that
she's carrying with her. And then Angel Reese you know, uh,
(33:04):
you know, pointing to her finger with the national championship
and uh, and then kind of being the villain in
the story. Uh, but you know what the villain. The
villain has feelings to, the villain has a heart to.
The villain can be sad, the villain can be uh,
can be hurt, uh and all those different things. And
so I think Angel Reese, uh, like I said, when
(33:25):
you look at those two different quotes, because I think
these were in the same press conference where she talked
about being h not being happy and then went immediately
right to being unapologetically her and being strong and all
those kinds of things. I think she was trying to
protect her vulnerability because she probably understood the backlash that
was gonna come from her being vulnerable. And then Caitlyn
(33:47):
Clark really kind of brick keeping her her camp really
really tight, but also talking about the importance of to
the point where she felt like every college athlete should
have access to a sports colleges or to therapy, because
it's such a stressful time of your life. Like you
just imagine trying to do and be all the things
(34:09):
that that you know in an eighteen to twenty two
year old person is without all the basketball, without all
the attention, and all the media attention and all the
national attention. It's difficult in and of itself, and then
you layer all the other stuff on it. There's no
way on God's green earth that anybody would go through
that without having to have some help or some type
(34:31):
of therapy. Like I said, whether it's official therapy with
a therapist or some type of coping mechanism, it's just
you're just not equipped to handle all of that. And
so whoever says that they are, they would just be
lying because I guarantee you if you looked at their lives,
you could find ways that either they were suffering from
it or you know, like like I'll be honest, like
(34:51):
there were nights after I retired and just to stress
and trauma of this person that you used to be
basically like died and you have to grieve that part
of you. I would get up in the middle it
would get it would get so intense. I would get
up in the middle of the night and I had
this Dodge Ram SRT ten that had put I had
(35:16):
put all these supercharges and things on it, so it
had about close to two thousand horsepower. And I would
get up at two or three o'clock at night or
in the morning, and I'd see how fast I could
go to Olympia and back. So I would start in
Redmond Woodenville area and I would just get on four
or five and then hit five south and I'm just
I would go as fast as I could possibly go.
(35:37):
And I have every excuse in my mind ready to
tell the police officers if I got pulled over, and
I just try to go down there as discuss. I
needed the adrenaline rush to kind of relieve me of
the pressure that I was feeling about who am I,
Where am I going? What's next? Like? Who am I?
Without football? All these different kinds of things. So I
can't imagine being eighteen to twenty two years old and
you're just trying to figure out life. You're trying to
(35:58):
figure out like you know, even you know, I think
the kids still go to the classes nowadays, so you
still you still trying to do college work and assignments
and things. I think they take a lot of This
is what I just learned too. And and my son
at Portland State kind of I would call him and
be like, dude, why are you Why are you not
in class? So go dad, I take the class online.
Say well why do we go to college? Why are
(36:20):
we paying room on board? Now? If all the classes
are online, you don't ever have to go to a classroom.
But but that's a that's another story. But but I
can't imagine you're trying to get all that stuff done
and then trying to be the best teammate you can be,
trying to be the best you know, daughter, you know, son, brother, sister,
whatever it is that you're trying to be, trying to
(36:40):
have a social life, trying to be the best basketball
player you can be, and then dealing with all this
other stuff that gets layered on top. There's just no
way that you that you can get through all of
that without having some type of coping mechanism. And I
think with these two players, you saw how very different
the coping skills were or the mechanism they use. But
(37:01):
they were ways to protect themselves and get through all
of that stuff. So I noted it was a lot,
but I think that the way that these two responded
to the stress and trauma and the unfair pressure and
the unrealistic expectations of it all in a way that
(37:22):
they felt would protect themselves, that's what they did. And
to me, that is both are signs that therapy and
sports psychologists and all these different things are important. That's
why it's vital. That's why in nineteen forty nine they
came up with the Mental Health Awareness muff because they
(37:44):
were concerned and wanted to bring attention to the mental
health and wellness of American lives and celebrating the healing
of that. And so it's no different today. Those two,
to me should be applauded for how they went about it.
And you can decide whether you like one or the other,
(38:05):
or you think, you know, Caitlyn is the best basketball
player or not, and all that kind of stuff, that's
that's all cool. I was more concerned about just how
they're managing all of that stuff, and how they're managing
like even the the the thrills of the wind and
the agony of the defeat, and then and then and
then laying it all with all this other kind of stuff. Man,
(38:25):
it was it cannot have been the most pleasant experience,
even though they were doing amazing, great things because they
probably had to be on all the time. But I
just wanted to try to keep it kind of current
and just kind of help you see that how mental
health and wellness plays a part and just about everything
and every aspect of your life, and and in different ways,
(38:48):
and it can be seen and viewed and and people
can deal with it and process it different ways, and
therapy can look different for different people, and protecting yourself
from all the noise can look different from different from uh,
you know, from from two totally different people, but in
all the same they both were dealing with uh I
(39:09):
don't I don't want to say it's like a mental illness,
but they were concerned about their mental health in a
way that they came up with ways to protect themselves.
As we started to show out again that May is
Mental Health Awareness Month, and so I tried to find
some data to kind of just speak to some of
(39:31):
the mental health things in our country, really, and what
I found is that I'm gonna just read some of
these off because I couldn't memorize them all. And this
is current to twenty twenty four that fifty seven point
eight million adults live with some form of mental illness
(39:52):
and can and it can vary from individuals who can
perform daily task and work with mental illness to some
people who qualify for disability due to their mental health.
So fifty seven point eight million people adults. That is
so a lot of the adults that are saying that, hey,
(40:13):
you need to tough it out and back in my day,
this is how we did it, and all this other
kind of stuff. They are part of the fifty seven
point eight million that are suffering, and whether they are
willing to acknowledge it or not, that's what's happening. And
I'm hoping that there are people in their lives that
care enough that can reach out to them, show up
for them, and point them in the right direction to
(40:34):
get the help that they need. Anxiety disorders are the
most common mental illness. And I'll be honest with you
today I got about a mile from here and I
just could not breathe. I was just having an anxiety attacked.
There's some things that I need to deal with in
(40:57):
my life, and they just kind of all jumped on
my back when I got a mile from here. And
so actually when I called NASA, the producer said, I
just pulled up. I had been sitting outside for a
few minutes in my car just trying to breathe because
I could not get I couldn't get an air past
my chest, like my chest was really really tight. And
anxiety is one of those things that I that I
(41:19):
deal with, and so I had to like really work
hard at some of the skills, the breathing techniques to
kind of been able to put some things down so
that I can get myself to a place where I
could walk through the door. And NASA didn't think I
was having a heart attack and that I wasn't sweating
so hard that I needed that I needed a change
of clothing. And then the next thing is that women
(41:41):
are more likely than men to experience depression. Seventeen percent
of adolescence between the ages of twelve and seventeen experienced
a major depressive episode. And I think this is interesting
because I think our young people are under a well
I don't think I know they're under a tack through
social media, through what the expectations are that they should
(42:06):
be how they are based on the click of a
like or not like or what have you. You're either
popular or you're not popular. You see people that are
doing what seems like amazing things, traveling the world, taking pictures,
looking like their lives are just incredible, and you're expecting
that because your life isn't that that something is wrong
(42:27):
with you, even though a lot of those pictures and
a lot of things that people are doing are just
so superficial in and of themselves that the pressure that
is I've read this article, i want to say, like
a couple of years ago, and it's talking about early
childhood development, and it talked about years ago that a
(42:47):
young person would look to an adult in their life,
whether it was a teacher, a parent, a neighbor, or whatever.
They would look to an adult in their life for
validation to that they knew that like whatever they were doing,
where they succeeded or fail, that person said, hey, sure,
you know, you'll be creative, confessional key, and that helped
(43:11):
this young person along well. In today's society, those same
young people look to other young people for that validation.
And if you think about that, where are they look
into these other young people all over social media. If
you look at social media, you're hot one day, you're cold,
the next day. You're the greatest thing on the face
of the earth. One minute, you're the worst person on
(43:33):
the face of earth. The next minute. The clothes you
wear one second, it gets a million likes. Those same
clothes the next day don't get any likes. And so
you judge your whole validation and well being on likes
and clicks and what is popular and what's not popular.
So your emotions are up and down. So, of course,
seventeen percent of adolescents between twelve and seventeen experienced a
(43:56):
major depressive order, like absolutely, that's kind of happened. Thirty
three percent of adults with mental illness also have a
substance use disorder. So sometimes the drinking or the drugging,
or you know, whatever substance you're using is a result
of the mental illness that you're having. And so some
people may go like, well, we need to address the
(44:19):
substance abuse, which is yes, you do, but the root
of it isn't the substance abuse, it's the mental illness.
And so you can you can get them to stop
drinking to stop drugging, But if the mental illness isn't address,
then they're going to go back to doing those. If
the mental illness isn't address, you don't have the coping
skills and the techniques that you need to keep you
from going back to the bottle or to the pill
(44:40):
or to the whatever it is you know, drug that
you use. Almost four times as many men commit suicide
as women. And so to me, this is interesting because
we live in a culture, in a society where especially
like our guys that are my age now, like middle
aged dudes and either you know, forty to sixty five
(45:03):
years old, think that our way of growing up was
the best way to grow up and you had to
be tough and physical, and you couldn't show emotions and
you can't cry and all these other kind of things,
and people can't have feelings and feelings aren't real and
all that kind of stuff. But almost four times as
many men commit suicide as women. So if you think
about some of these numbers, and you if you if
(45:24):
you hear these numbers, and I got these from the MHA,
the Mental Health Awareness Association, if you hear these numbers,
and you can still justify somehow that mental health isn't real,
or that that that means that you're soft, or that
it means you're not tough, or or you need to
(45:46):
live the way you lived in yester year and you
know some other time then man, like you were really
barking up the wrong tree, and you are maybe leading
and guiding people to making some really bad decisions. Mental
health is a real thing. It's not something imagined. It's
not something that's trivial. Its real and to be taken seriously.
(46:07):
It's not about being weak or soft. It's not about
we were tougher in my day. And like I said,
to be honest and blunt about it. Those that say
that are part of the fifty eight million adults that
suffer and part of the group of men that commit
suicide at the rate four times of women. If there
are people in your life that are suffering, show up
(46:30):
for them. I heard it. I was at a I'm
actually doing a talk for a keynote for Evergreen Hospital
in October for their hospice care and the the theme
of my of my talk is the power of showing up.
And if you not that someone is suffering and you
(46:54):
can show up for the humanity of that person, regardless
of what their life looks like, regardless of how they act,
regardless of the things they've done or haven't done, whether
you like the way they do it or don't like
the way they do it, If they are suffering, it's
important that you show up for the humanity of who
they are because sometimes the things that the things that
we see outurardly is a result of the way that
(47:14):
they're feeling inwardly, and so it's best to show up
and not be needed than to not show up and
lose a soul. Like I have friends in my life
that I have a circle of maybe like four or
five guys, and they can call me out on anything
at any time, in any situation, because I would rather
(47:36):
them call me out if they if they think that
I'm walking towards the edge of a cliff and I'm
about to fall off, and they call me out on
it and they're wrong, I would rather that happen than
for them to not call me out and I just
walk right off the cliff. And so I give them
permission just to do that, and I don't take it personally.
I don't if they need more information to have a
(47:57):
better understanding of what's happening in my life. Give them
more information. But it's better to show up than to
not show up, even if even if you're what you're
showing up for could be the wrong thing, or you
don't have all the information. Like I said before, I
suffer from anxiety and a depression and panic attacks. But
I've acquired skills and I've surrounded myself with people that
(48:18):
can help me, that can help me deal with it.
And I can't tell you that you know that every
day and every time it happens that I have instant success. Nope,
Sometimes I'm just stuck for a couple of days. But
I know that I'm gonna be okay, and I know
that I have people that are checking in on me.
(48:39):
I know what I have people that have come alongside me.
I know I have people that will show up for me,
and I cannot be more appreciative and grateful and thankful
that they do. I don't know that I'd be sitting
here in this chair having this conversation with you guys
had people not shown up for me and the Sea Hawks.
(49:02):
Like I said before, the guys on our broadcast team
NASA and Bump and Paul and Brian and Turbo and
Truefont and Babino, all those guys have shown up for
me in some form of fashion through this journey with me,
like the Seahawks, you know, helping me do this podcast
and give me the space to do it. And then,
like I talked about earlier, Derek and Jessica with the
(49:23):
Mindful Therapy group have really shown up for me in
ways that man, I just can't thank them enough for
because I really needed it and I didn't know what
to do with who to turn to, and those people
really showed up. So check in on your people, and
sometimes those that seem the happiest and like they have
it the most together are the ones that are suffering
(49:45):
the most, because those sometimes responses to the stress and
the trauma and the hard times is to make it
look like I promise you the day before, like I
want to say, maybe two years now, the day before,
for I just fell apart on my couch crying and
didn't know what to do. If you had asked anybody
(50:06):
in my life like how's Ray doing, they'd have been like,
this dude is the happiest dude ever. Like this dude
shows up for everybody. He shows up with a smile
on his face. You know, he runs late to the
broadcast shows sometimes, but he gets there and and and
I'm you know, I work hard, I show up for
the people I work for and all that kind of stuff,
(50:26):
But man, I was suffering in silence. And there are
so many of us that are suffering and silence. So
even though yes, show up for the people that you
can visibly see that they're suffering. But also I think
I heard someone say today, bug like bug the people
to a fault to make like even if they get
mad at you. And and because sometimes it's the people
(50:49):
that has the biggest smile, have the biggest Albert personality,
seems like they have life in order and everything's going right.
Sometimes those are the people that are suffering the most.
So make sure that you check in on your people,
especially the ones that seem like they have it going well.
And then, like we end every show, there are three
things to remember. Number one, it's okay to not be okay.
(51:13):
Number two, if you're having a mental health crisis, reach
out to your medical provider for assistance and guidance. If
you just need someone to talk to, try the m
h A warm lines. And I know my Southern accent
makes it sounds like I'm saying worm, but I'm saying
warm w A R M lines. A warm line is
a phone number you can call to have a conversation
(51:35):
with someone someone who can provide support during hard times.
The lines are staffed by trained peers who have been
through their own mental health struggles and know what it's
like to need help. Go to warmline dot org, select
your state and you will see a list of numbers
to call. They're free and confidential. If it's a more
serious situation where you are concerned about your safety and
(51:59):
or you're having thoughts about suicide, doal nine eight eight
to reach a suicide and crisis lifeline and number three
if you need help and you ask for help, you're
operating from a position of power. So, like I said, again, man,
thank you guys for tuning in, Thank you guys for listening.
Been away for a little bit, but we're about to
(52:19):
get back on the grind. Hopefully next episode we'll have
Derek Crane, who's the founder of the Mindful Therapy Group
on the show. And like we always ended, this is
big Ray, Big Raise Garage Grind, Mental Health Edition Peace
and I'm Out
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