In July 1990, Joyce Mikal-Flynn died after finishing a swimming race and sinking to the bottom of the pool. After 22 minutes of CPR, she was revived--but her recovery took much longer than that. One of her doctors later said, "You are the luckiest person I've ever met." In this episode, Dr. Mikal-Flynn describes her death-defying--and life-altering--experience, her road back to health, and how she found new purpose in helping others grow and thrive. She is now a professor and an expert in resilience and recovery; she also has developed a system called metahabilitation, which helps veterans, first responders, people dealing with addiction, and others with post-traumatic growth. Dr. Mikal-Flynn's story--and her work--are models of courage and resilience.
In this episode:
Want to know more about Dr. Joyce Mikal-Flynn?
Want to know more about "What It's Like To..."?
In July 1990, Joyce Mikal-Flynn died after finishing a swimming race and sinking to the bottom of the pool. After 22 minutes of CPR, she was revived--but her recovery took much longer than that. One of her doctors later said, "You are the luckiest person I've ever met." In this episode, Dr. Mikal-Flynn describes her death-defying--and life-altering--experience, her road back to health, and how she found new purpose in helping others grow and thrive. She is now a professor and an expert in resilience and recovery; she also has developed a system called metahabilitation, which helps veterans, first responders, people dealing with addiction, and others with post-traumatic growth. Dr. Mikal-Flynn's story--and her work--are models of courage and resilience.
In this episode:
Want to know more about Dr. Joyce Mikal-Flynn?
Want to know more about "What It's Like To..."?
I went to see a, doctor,
and he said, you are the luckiest person I've ever met. .
I have never met anybody who had that much C P R survived and actually is sitting up here talking to me.
And
Ah.
the other thing too, your life has changed forever. Your life will never be the same.
In July of 1990, Joyce Michael Flynn [00:01:00] died as she was finishing a swimming race and with no warning, she sunk to the bottom of the pool. After 22 minutes of C P R, she came back to life, but her recovery took much longer than that. What's remarkable is not just that she survived this death event, but also what she has chosen to do with her life.
Dr. Joyce Michael Flynn is an expert in trauma care and resilience, and uses her unique system of recovery habilitation to guide survivors toward post-traumatic growth. She's also an author and is currently a professor at Sacramento State University, Dr. Joyce Michael Flynn. Welcome to the podcast.
Ah, so happy to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me.
I am so interested in your story and everything that you've done since then, when I first heard about your story, I was stopped short in my tracks of course, we have to start with the traumatic event itself. What happened?
Well, you know, just to [00:02:00] give you some background, I don't remember any of that, I kind of remember going out to dinner with some friends Friday night, and then there was this weekend big. Championship swim, meet my children were on a team and it was multi-team swim meet over the weekend.
Don't remember any of that. there's about a month of my life that I don't remember. I have no memory at all. But, on that particular day from what people have shared with me, they were going to have a fun adult relay well, Uber competitive, and I do marathoning.
I was doing a lot of triathlon, doing a lot of swimming. And so I grabbed my husband and a couple of friends and said, come on, let's go swim this and we're gonna win this, and I'm gonna swim the last lap because I'm the fastest. And I did, and I finished at the side of the pool that was 13 feet. And I did finish and I was told, the timer asked me [00:03:00] if I needed help out. I said no, and something happened and I just sunk to the bottom of the pool. My husband pulled me from the bottom of the pool and luckily because there were a lot of children there, there were a lot of parents there, and there was an ER doctor and a cardiac nurse specialist and everything.
So I had really good CPR at poolside. For a little over 20 minutes, and then they landed a helicopter close to where I was at. And on the way to uc, Davis, trauma center, I was told, my heart stopped again. They gotta go in the helicopter. And that's when I ended up on a respirator in I C U andmy life changed forever. my life changed forever. So in terms of actually what happened, I was never given a complete answer as to the reason things happened the way they did. you know, I was only 35 years old. I don't drink alcohol when they're smoking. and so why did this [00:04:00] happen? they finally came up with what is called an AV nodal reentry problem. So in lay terms, some sort of an electrical issue happened. we have electrical. activity in our brain, And electrical activity in our heart. There's these electrical pathways that cause heart movement, Valves open and close hearts to contract and whatever.
And so there could have been some blockage, some. Apparent electrical, messaging that caused the heart to just kind of stop
And being in the pool heightened
Probably if I was on land standing there, I probably would've just passed out and been okay,
But I think because of what they're considering to be an electrical issue of the pathway in my heart that caused a disruption to how things were moving in my heart, and I think I [00:05:00] passed out and I happened to be in water and when I passed out, Sunk to the bottom of the pool, and I think there could have been maybe a little drowning situation on top of that. there's obviously more involved in that, but that's kind of what it is.
So nobody really knows I had all sorts of testing and nobody could really come out with a specific diagnosesSo it was very complex. I haven't had any problems since then and I've done lots of stuff. I went to see a, doctor,
and he examined me, looked at all my studies that had been done, and he looked at me and he said, I have just a few things to say to you. Number one, you are the luckiest person I've ever met. . I have never met anybody who had that much C P R and survived and actually is sitting up here talking [00:06:00] to me.
And he said the other thing too, your life has changed forever. Your life will never be the same. And there's decisions you have to make about how you wanna live that life. Because there was a lot of people that said, I should never run again and I should never swim again. And I should never, never, never.
And he said, Those are decisions you're gonna have to make. And one of the things that I recognized is, I kept pushing. you know, I want my life back and I want the way my life was. and when he kind of gave me the permiss. to take control. I relaxed a little bit and I thought, well, maybe I don't need to run that. Maybe I don't need to do that. But it was just always being told no and, negative spins put on what happened to me and that is what really brought forth the work I do because can we take a more balanced approach to these situations and [00:07:00] acknowledge there were problems and things were bad, but there were also gifts. There were also things I learned. There were also things, that were positive that came as a result of that. So I. What really prompted me to get into the workthat I have been doing since that happened in 1990 and I got my Master's in 1992, and it really has just generated that work since that time.
So can I go back a little to the medical stuff of what happened during the C P r 22 minutes of C P R is remarkable. Some people have some C P R and they're not pronounced dead, or they haven't had a death event. So can you kind of explain what was going on?
yeah. So, when my husband pulled me from the bottom of the pool, I was told that these physicians came over and realized that I wasn't breathing [00:08:00] and I didn't have a pulse. So they immediately, C p r, and I didn't even know it was that long until. A few months later, I ran it and I knew all these people. I mean, we lived in this community and I knew all these doctors. I had a degree in nursing and I was a nurse practitioner at the time, so I knew all these docs. And so one of them, I saw him just in passing and I said, Hey, Gary, you know, I was curious, how long did you guys.
Go. How long was the C P r? And he just like straight face, just said 22 minutes and I, couldn't even talk. because before I became a nurse practitioner, I was an I C U nurse and we used to resuscitate a lot and I to him. I go, Gary, excuse me.
He goes, yeah. And I said, my God, did you think about, Stopping. He goes, Joyce, we all knew you. Your [00:09:00] husband's there, no, we were not gonna stop c p r, but they got it enough to, get a pulse and get it going and get me on the helicopter to get me to the hospital. But I, don't remember obviously being in ICU at all coming off the respirator. the first thing I remember, was sitting up in a hospital. I guess it was at night. I had no idea what time of day it was. And you know, no IVs anymore,
and my brother and sister-in-law were sitting at the end of the bed and I looked at them and I said, where am I? And I had asked that question lots of times. I just didn't remember it, And they said, well, you know, you're in the hospital. And I said, well, what am I here for?
What happened? And they kind of gave me a little background. And I can remember like looking at my arms and I didn't have any IVs on it. And I remember pulling my gown forward and I didn't see any burn marks on my chest and I said, no, that couldn't have happened. And they said, no, that did happen.
And then they said, can [00:10:00] we get you anything? and my favorite meal is a, cheeseburger, french fries and a vanilla shake. And I just remember being so hungry. I said, yes, you can get me. one of those things that's kind of brown and then it has yellow stuff on it, and you can drive through places and get it.
And it comes with these long things with salt on them and a cup of this cold, white, and so, Was
showed your memory.
yeah, and I was able to speak, but I had horrible aphasia and I had what we now know of as a tbi, From the extended c p r. But I never heard the word tbi. I now, this was, what, 35 years ago or so.
it was a lot of tough things to go through with that, but that was really tough that I had lost a tremendous memory. I'd see people, I'd known for years and I knew I knew them. I just I didn't know their name. I remember [00:11:00] going home and. I can specifically remember standing there with my children. So our son wasn't quite two, and our daughters are seven and eight. So it's a lot. And I remember standing in the kitchen and saying to them, tell mommy where are the dishes? where is the silverware? What did I used to cook? Tell me what I cooked.
Or I'd take him to my closet and I'd say, show me what I wore, what did mommy used to wear? You know, that kind of stuff. So yeah, I was in pretty bad shape.
and what an impact on them too. You know, mommy, a month ago was one way, and now mommy is so different,
Oh yeah, I was the kind of mom too, you know? I worked part-time. I was an athlete, I was on it. I did everything. I was like with it, I was busy and things just changed. Dramatically, and the life I had before was dramatically shifted [00:12:00] into this other, I can barely recognize my husband
andan ER doc that I knew, Bruce Gordon, , I saw him about three months after, or.
and he said, Hey, how you doing? And I said, you know, physically, I'm actually not too bad. I, I'm really tired. I just remember being so tired all the time. But I said, Bruce, you know, I think I have brain damage though. And he kind of smiled and he said, look it, you're an athlete and when you have an athletic injury, you have to.
He said, you're gonna have to rehab your brain. And as soon as he said that, that made sense to me. And then I also said, I could hear people not being meaner, but kind of snickering. Oh look it, she's in such good shape. and look what happened to her. And Bruce said that could have happened to anybody.
He said, I am telling you right now, if you had not been in the physical shape and health you were in, there is no way you would've gotten through that. [00:13:00] It is only because you were in such great. shape and you didn't drink, you didn't smoke, you didn't do that. That, that was the thing that kind of got through.
So, I just kind of
So your good physical shape is what helped you survive the 22 minutes of
Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. .And I think also, from what we know now about brain and brain health, my physical activity, helped with that as well. And I got cardiac rehab and back into physical activity again, which also helped my brain.
when Bruce said, you have to rehab your brain. all of a sudden I went, oh, okay. I'll just start asking for help here and there. And that was huge. And one of the things that I did specifically was I had gotten my. Training for my NP nurse practitioner program at uc Davis.
and I went back to my faculty. , and they knew what [00:14:00] happened So I asked them, Could I just sit in your classes again and just start to listen again and kind of grab that?
And so they let me do that. I did speech therapy, for cognition training because of my aphasia and that helped, I got back into exercise and my beautiful, wonderful colleague, Dr. Dan Fields, he and I were in co practice. He's a family practice physician and I'm a nurse practitioner and we practice together for years and it is, Precisely because of him.
He brought me back several months later into practice and he just started giving me easy things to do, easy patients to see. and he would see every patient after me. And he did this for a long time until I just got back into it all. And. Also, two years after my accident, I decided if I really [00:15:00] wanna get my brain back, I should go back to. So I went over to Sac State, to apply for their master's in nursing, I thought I'll just do that. That'll really push my brain again. And it's funny, I went to the nursing program. To the office and the secretary there And I said, hi, this is who I am. I had this event happen. I'm in really much better shape, but I think I'd like to do this to get better. And as I was telling her that this woman walked out of her office, the woman who's a director of the program, and that's Dr.
Robin Nelson. She heard me saying something and then she stopped and she said, who are you? And I said, Joyce Michael Flynn, what happened to you? And I told her and she goes, oh my God. I was there that day. I was there that day that that happened. She said, I had
She was a parent.
She was a parent. She had a daughter on another swim team, and she said, I was [00:16:00] there that day.
She goes, come on in my office. And she became, a mentor. She actually, eventually, when I got my doctorate, I applied for a position at Sac State. She hired me there.
Wow. It all came around.
Yeah.
I think it's so interesting that a person who goes through such a trauma, there's healing of so many sorts, right? there's psychological. Healing and there's physical healing of course, and emotional healing
spiritual healing and
yeah. and then what your next steps are going to be. you can look at the world many different ways as a result of such an experience.
And it sounds like what you decided to do was really take it on and look for What what's the. result I can take from all of this and how can I contribute back? I'm not gonna let this stop me. I'm gonna see how this empowers.
Right, and I really wanted to look at what could we learn from this and [00:17:00] when that door closed. what does it mean to look at other opportunities or other things? And you know, all over this time I've really had to process. It sounds weird, is this big word process.
Between my own personal life and my academic work and looking at the science behind this and really putting this all together and listening to hundreds of survivor stories and thinking this all through and making sense of this. I really come to the conclusion that, when you go through something like I went through or other people go through, Major things or even adversities or challenges
people, think, well, I need to get over that. And I said, there is no getting over this stuff. you don't get over it. You find a way to integrate it meaningfully into your life. You find a way to use it to see things that sometimes, unfortunately people who have lost [00:18:00] children, people who've lo, I mean, there's lots, you didn't choose it, but Life brought this to you.
And at a certain point we have to understand, well, what this teach me about the life I'm living right now and what I can do with that life. So, yeah, I think that's more where I want people to spend energy at too. people have questioned me throughout the years with a lot of that, What do you mean post-traumatic growth?
And I said, here's what I've also learned about post-traumatic growth. You can grow and still be depressed or grieve. you are taken back to that event. I can think about my event and talk about it and I can get very emotional. cuz you know, there's a memory center that I can go back there, but that doesn't mean I can't and haven't grown.
They can live together. So there's a lot of things. to [00:19:00] understand about that, and you don't really let go. you use it. You evolve as a result of these.
Talked about that kind of stark before and after, like you were this. Active involved. And then you were home asking your little kids where are the dishes and all of that. Did you have a whole process of kind of grieving your former self
Oh yeah.
did it take a lot of years for you to come to this place of, oh, I can coexist.
These two things can kind of live in tandem that I can hold. these wonderful memories of who I was and I can grow into who I.
Yeah. as I started looking at this, I could do things on my own. I didn't need any help. but I got to a point with this where I remember having an epiphany like, this is bigger than anything I've gone through in my life, and if I am going to move forward, I am going to have to ask for and accept help.[00:20:00]
and that
That's hard to do.
Oh, it was hard. but once I let people in to help, that was a game changer. there were some things going on with the way I was making decisions, meaning I wasn't making some good decisions getting speeding tickets and things. And my husband said, I don't know what's wrong with you, but you are not, you know, and I went to go, to a therapist for a while.
So helpful just to kind of, go through this grieving disability to cry and to me, I was going through, you know, why, why is this hap I didn't get this. Like I'd done everything right and this shouldn't happen. And, and I also relied on, um, some spiritual guidance along those lines.
And so it was a good. year and a half or two, where I just remember going through a lot. I remember at my [00:21:00] two year marker, I was kind of like, yeah, I think I'm kind of where I was before. I think I am, intellectually and everything where I was before, but I had shifted so much in how I saw life. and just kind of took this all on. that was also a big change in my life where I had to back and. Actually just do things for the enjoyment of them and not because I had to race everything or be that fast. I've marathoned and triathlon again, not at the level I used to.
yeah in sports or kind of being competitive, you looked at yourself differently. It sounds like maybe you were a little easier on yourself. well, you looked at all of life, I'm sure, quite differently. you had to give yourself a little more grace with everything.
And I remember going out and running and just feeling so appreciative that I was running, not that I was running a seven minute mile, but that I was [00:22:00] running
just doing it.
Oh, I was just so appreciative of all the things that I got to do going to my children's school things I can remember driving there and going, I'm so grateful that I'm actually able to go to do those things and be around them and see them grow up.
I mean, right now. Well, we have three children. They're all married. Love all the people they married, which is great. We have six grandchildren. I mean,
this is so amazing to me when I look back on what could have been and what was, and how things moved forward and. what we have in our life. And it doesn't mean, I always tell people, here's the thing too, that just cuz you go through one pretty significant event doesn't mean that's it.
Unfortunately, you know, I've gone through other very significant things with the death of my parents suddenly and things like that. But I [00:23:00] have also adopted a mindset. skills and behaviors around I don't wanna say work through that, but how to work within the realm of life's adversities, disappointments, and even traumas.
How to work with that
Yeah, I think that is a large part of it, isn't it? A mindset if we decide. to sort of stay in frustration or the why me or the grief or whatever it might be that you're experiencing if you decide to stay in that negative space, which is fine to experience it's human nature to be there, but you almost have to choose.
to move forward through it. in doing some research, before talking to you. you had identified like six stages that people tend to go through, like confusion and then there's a turning point and they try different treatments to move forward and you know, almost have to allow yourself to go down this path to move [00:24:00] forward, it
seems. Is that right? I, I'm no expert, but I'm just trying to understand
no, that is a beautiful way to do it. And so thanks for, pitching that out there. That's great. One of the things too, my most recent book that I wrote came out in 2021 called Anatomy of a Survivor. I was able to really, again, go very deep into the science of all this, and especially deep into the science of post-traumatic growth.
And that is not my term, that is a term coined. Dr. Richard Esky and Lawrence Calhoun. And so I had a chance to talk to Dr. Esky when I was doing my book and kind of get some more insight. And one of the things that I really learned was, number one, what I said before, that grief and growth can live together.
The other thing that became very clear to me is you must go at this situation in order to. engage. You must engage [00:25:00] in order to grow, so you can't sit back and hope it happens. It is precisely like going at the beast or engaging with the situation that brings forward that growth and a metaphor that I use with my students or people a lot that maybe gives them an idea of that.
As an example, if you want to get stronger biceps, you can't sit around hoping your biceps will get stronger. Even praying for that, you've got to engage. You've got to do some weight lifting. You've gotta do some things in order to strengthen those biceps, and that is what happens with post-traumatic growth Meta.
The thing you're alluding to with the stages,
Mm-hmm.
habilitation or short meab, is a system that I created, a mechanism of sorts that's broken up into [00:26:00] six stages. And as you go through these six stages, the end result is post-traumatic growth. Now, when I created. Meab. So meta going above and beyond habilitation restoration. Habilitation means going above and beyond restoration. People do that all the time. I didn't have to study as to whether people did it. They do it all the time. They use adversities and challenges and disappointments and even traumas to do this.
What I wanted to recognize was a mechanism Pathway a structured way to achieve that. And that's what Meab is. And the structure involves six stages, listening to so many people reading books about it, watching documentaries about it, those survivors told.
how they did it. I would listen to stories and I'd [00:27:00] go, oh, they kind of go through this and, and then they go through that and then they go through that. And so I took what I heard from patients and documentaries and all sorts of people meant, oh, I'm gonna structure, and it's a six stage structure that people go through and we put them through that. Very powerful. Really great. over the years, I've worked with people with addiction dependency, spinal cord injuries, cancer. I'm currently doing quite a bit of work with women who've experienced domestic violence and been sex trafficked. I've worked with, veterans first responders. student athletes. so. it can be applied in a variety of different areas.
I am gonna read through them. as far as I understand them, please interrupt me if I have them incorrect.
But, stage one confusion about what is happening to me. Stage two, a turning point maybe I'd like to move forward. Stage three, you can, [00:28:00] choose to try a variety of different treatments to move forward. stage four, acceptance and adaptation. You start to reflect like, where am I?
Where do I wanna go with this? Stage five reintegration, you start returning to life. You start normalizing your life a little more. And stage six, the habilitation, you begin taking on the future. Think, what can I do now?
So that's very good. I love that. I'll just clarify a couple of things because No, but you said it just very, very well. So stage one you're talking about is, I call that the acute stage. That's kind of deer in the headlights, what just happened. The acute stage is just getting day to day to day.
people will say, well, what's gonna happen? I go, I don't know. I don't know what's gonna happen down the road, but what we need to just get you through is today, tomorrow, the next day. That may be a month, two month, whatever. So we just have to work with [00:29:00] where we are now, getting people in and out of the hospital, whatever, where it's at stage Two is the turning point, and I always challenge people who listen.
To my story and what I'm doing. I go, I know you've been through something. Might not have been this death event, but you've been through something. And there is a point in time where you make a conscious decision that I do not like what just happened here, but I am gonna move forward.
I am gonna move forward. And once they make that decision to engage, to get in there and engage with the process, that turning point, then they go to stage three. And that's a variety of therapies and treatments conventional and non-conventional and family members and friends can really help out because they'll go, Hey, I heard about this or I heard about that.
And so it's a very busy. active time for them. [00:30:00] And then stage four is acceptance and adaptation. For now, you might not have to be there all the time, but you gotta stop just for a second and say, I gotta take a breather. What did this all just mean? Where am I at now? where do I wanna go? Where's my family at?
And maybe I accept this again and adapt to this situation. Doesn't mean in the future things aren't gonna get better. Different, but for now. And then stage five is reintegration. You've got to get back into life in some way. You've kind of talked about where people can grieve and go through that. One of the things I like to tell the soldiers I work with too, is I go look it. I have got to give you time. I wish I could take this away, but I've got to give you time to get bummed out to grieve, And you have to take that time. But I will not leave you there. I have to come back and get you because we gotta move forward. And [00:31:00] so that's kind of getting back into life. And stage six is the meab stage.
That's when people have taken on. Situations and develop these mindsets, it's not that they're not ever going to get depressed or grieve or what. but they, they don't stay there as long and they get to start seeing. Some silver linings or look at where I'm at now and it doesn't even mean they had the life they had before.
So my first book is called Turning Tragedy into Triumph, and it is habilitation a contemporary model of rehab. And after I wrote that book, I had what they call beta readers. They read it and they give you feedback. And two things these readers wanted to know.
they had these wonderful stories of these amazing survivors, and people said, well, I wanna know where they're at now, and I wanna see pictures. So I went back and I was [00:32:00] able, Reinterview, each of the survivors that were in that.
Oh.
And clearly one of the things that I recognized with each of these survivors, and this was a couple years after my first interview, none of them talked about their accident. And I was even talking about a young man who was, in a wh. . He had a single car accident, a spinal cord injury, and he was a rugby player at Berkeley.
And and I remember I was talking to him, I said, Hey, so You know what's going on? And he goes, oh yeah. well, here's what I'm doing now. You know, I'm almost finished graduating from Berkeley. I've got this other nonprofit going, I'm doing this. And some other people that I would talk to who's like, well, let me tell you what I'm doing now. So it's not that these have an imprint on them. just, when you move on, you have made your focus about control choice and what can I do? And I see that [00:33:00] over and over again. It isn't where people who had cancer didn't have, issues associated with that.
They had surgeries that left them, not the same as they were before, but the way. Took it on, and it's not like they don't cry about it or whatever, but they just choose to take control and focuses on what they have and what they can do, and that's such a powerful. Message. So that's the six stage of meab.
And once you adapt that mindset, again, are gonna go through things that are gonna throw you off. There's no question about it, but you usually not gonna go quite as low as you did before, cuz now you know what to do or you
Or stay there as long,
Yep. Yeah.
you can kind of dwell and just stay, but people have the capacity for growth and for change and don't need to just sort [00:34:00] of stay in the muck forever. As we've mentioned before, if you choose to, you can change and grow stronger and, I think that this is a beautiful kind of pathway and you have so many examples from your own work and your own life is that example.
and that's what the courage is about. The courage is not going through a situation. The courage is the aftermath.
Yes.
people developed courage. They developed insights. They developed, new ways of being. They developed all that, not because of what happened, but as a result of it, and so that's why it's so absolutely. Fundamentally important to start with these concepts with children, so when they're going through different adversities, to recognize, you know, what coming forth in terms of strength and capacity and resilience building and all that.
because like you say, [00:35:00] things are gonna happen. Very few people are gonna have as traumatic an incident as you had, but everyone's going to have advers. And so we have to prepare ourselves and our children life is going to have ups and downs and be prepared to, pick yourself up from what happens what are you going to do with yourself moving forward,
we have these mechanisms throughout our whole physical system. you can look at cardiovascular mechanisms, respiratory mechanisms, systems like that, look at immune systems. A perfect way to look at that, where you get exposed to something and your immune system goes.
What, what is that? And then it starts to identify and mounts a response. And that response gives the security that if they see that virus again or whatever, go, oh, don't worry, I got, I know what this is. We can do this. So we have these systems built into us throughout.
our bodies, our [00:36:00] minds, that give us this opportunity And is these experiences that allow you to engage very deeply with these systems to help them help you and ultimately to become bigger, better, and stronger.
Yeah. it's such a hopeful story. you can go through terrible things and become bigger, better, and stronger. as you have, and then you've also shared your knowledge and your experience and the wisdom you've gained from it with so many other people. It's really admirable.
Thank you. it's admirable, but it's also life-affirming. It's become my purpose. I actually have to do this. this is. tough to not be doing because it's so wonderful when you see these epiphanies or a light that comes up with people and they go, oh, oh, well I never recognize that about myself.
I so wonderful when I talk to students who are struggling [00:37:00] and I just have 'em come in my office and I sit down, I go, Tell me your story. and I will hear these unbelievable situations that these students have been through and after they're finished, I go you got this. Don't you understand? You got this, you're worried about this paper and you grew up in that situation and you're a college student now. there are bad things. I'm not saying they're not, but there are remarkable stories And I think if nothing else, me going through everything, I wanted to make that the focus. I understand trauma and that has to be addressed. And if there are things that. Causing that trauma. Things we can control and make choices around, we have to address that. But again, look at where people have come, engage that process to become [00:38:00] stronger.
Not in spite of what happened, but as a direct result.
. Yes. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story and all your wisdom that you've gained from it with us. I, feel like I'm educated and I'm inspired and I really appreciate it,
Well, that's what I want. Educated and inspired. that's terrific. Good, good, good. Good.
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