S3/E21-I'm Back

Where Has Bruce Been?
After a three-year pause, Don’t Forget To Breathe returns with a raw and transparent look at the life-changing events that kept Bruce away from the mic. In this powerful relaunch, Bruce shares his journey through divorce, trauma, therapy, self-discovery, healing, and a new direction in life. It's a fresh chapter—honest, heartfelt, and rooted in the hope of moving forward together.

Transcript

Bruce: 0:34

Welcome to Don't Forget to Breathe. I'm your host, Bruce Barker. All right, we're kicking off season three. And yes, it's been a minute. The last time I sat in this chair was in February 2022. It is now July 2025. A lot has happened during that time. And as I mentioned in the preview, I'm going to let you know what transpired and why the long delay, hiatus, break, whatever you want to call it. I'm just going to kind of cover all of that with you. Just need you to bear with me. There's a lot that I'm going to throw out there at you, but just keep in mind that it's all related to grief, loss, trauma. So it all kind of sews in together, and I think you'll see that as we go along. So here's the outline of what we're going to talk about. There was divorce. There was a lot of intensive therapy, shutting down a business, starting a brand new career, spending time with other parents who've lost children from a group standpoint, facilitating groups as well. A lot of growth, a lot of healing, and a lot of discovery and a new outlook on everyday life. So let's dive in. So after doing a season to wrap up, I could tell there was a lot of uh things going on with me, and I was just getting in a place where I didn't feel I could be authentic. And that's that's been the focus and the main key with this and and and hosting the podcast is to always be honest and transparent and genuine and present. And things were coming up just from um all the discussions and topics in the conversations on this podcast, and it brought up some things and that needed to be um dealt with. Honestly, since uh 2010 when we got married. That's because of just where I was in in my grief journey and my grief work, which my grief work had been zero. I had my strategies that leave what I've discussed before, basically avoiding holidays as a way of coping with the pain and the sadness. So it came up in the first Christmas that I had with my new family, thinking, you know, I'd I'd had four Christmases without my daughter, and so we were sitting around and uh the boys were decorating the tree, playing, started playing Christmas music, and I just lashed out and just you know, just yelled to turn it off. It it uh was such a visceral reaction to hearing holiday music and the pain that I was feeling from it. And I made the comment later I didn't understand why that was my reaction, because I had already I had had four Christmases, and my wife said, actually, no, you haven't. You avoided them, and this is your first one. So that kind of became a little bit of a theme throughout the marriage was reacting to reacting to my trauma, my grief, my loss, basically reacting to situations with anger as a way of coping with the fear that I was feeling and the sadness. And I created an atmosphere of eggshells, basically. So this was, you know, this went on and there was a lot of there was still a lot of growth and a lot of help and a lot of healing that was taking place, uh, but there was still a lot of damage going on throughout those years. Basically, one of the biggest things was, you know, I was never really, never a controlling person in a relationship. And my reactions to things um coming up certainly came across that way. So basically, to give you an example, if my wife was going somewhere, going to see someone out in the mountains, and I knew about how much time it would take, and you know, typically you make those little text messages as it's um, you know, hey, got here safe, you know, see you in a day or two, whatever it is, you know, whatever the situation. And when I wouldn't get that text an hour late, two hours late, or when the arrival time should have been, I immediately jumped to worst case scenario. I went from zero to worst instantly, rather than have a rational reaction. Okay, could have stopped for gas, stopped for coffee, got into a great conversation as soon as you got there. I immediately jumped to rolled the car off the side of a mountain and is dead in a ditch. And through later therapy and discovery, that's coming back to I had received the most unexpected, worst phone call ever of what I thought was impossible. So now everything became possible. So after getting that call about Kristen dying, anything was possible, and I jumped to that from fear, fear of losing again. And that created a lot of damage. So, you know, kind of fast forward to 2020, after the pandemic, basically there was a lot of time we spent together, um, as as probably all of you did, where you're a little bit isolated and you're spending a lot of time together, and and it's also a time that you're probably spending alone sometime as well, which is allowing you to process thoughts and feelings and actions. And that's what I was doing during that time from you know not working every day, but dealing with the pandemic and conversations. And that's when I realized I really needed, I really needed to get serious about therapy. And so that's when I began seeing a professional licensed therapist in 2020. And this continued, and one of the things, one of the results of that is instead of writing down what I was feeling and thinking about grief, was I launched the podcast so that I spoke what I was feeling, and that was the start of that. So I knew that this therapy was and and this additional grief work was working. Um because then the second to the last Christmas that we were together, I'd gone to grocery store, and you know, when you go in there during the holiday season, there's those little bags of pine cones that smell like cinnamon and you know smell like the holidays. And prior to that, I would go through and just kind of be repulsed by it and and you know, again, have a negative reaction. And in that Christmas, I smelt those pine cones and thought, huh, I'm gonna buy those, bring them home. So I did, I brought them home, and then family comes in later and they're going, where did the pine cones come from? And I said, I bought them. And they're like, really? And so it was certainly a shock to them. So while I was healing, there was a lot of damage that had already been created by my reactions during the holidays. So it was sort of a too many eggshells type of environment. So let's jump back into the therapy that I mentioned. Trying to get down to the root of what was going on and some of the things that were brought up again that I mentioned in the episodes uh in season two, it started bringing up some traumas that were outside of the grief, but together were a pretty volatile and lethal combination. There's this wheel of emotions. Um, if you've heard about it, that is awesome. You should take a look. If you haven't, you can look it up uh anywhere on the internet and pull it up. But basically, the emotions wheel gets down to the core emotion and and breaks out into all of these other descriptors of how you're feeling. So the wheel looks kind of like a piece of pizza, and it has the center as your core emotions of anger, disgust, sad, happy, surprise, and fear, and then it fans out from there. So it's basically like you're peeling back layers from the outside. So in my case, anger was my reaction from fear. And if you get a chance to look at the emotion wheel, there's one word that is in both fear and anger, the word insecure. What that was for me was a fear of loss. So a fear of losing again and how it all tied in. So there was an incident that occurred in the summer of 2021. My wife at the time and I we went up to visit some relatives. There were a lot of people coming to town, and we had a camper trailer at the time. Had set up the camper trailer, hadn't connected electricity or anything like that. She was going to stay and get the camper set up, and I was up at the house a little farther up the property, just visiting with uh with family. So someone said, I think there's some smoke back where the camper is. And I looked and I could see a little bit, and I went, oh, that's odd because I don't have any power hooked up. So I started a little jog down there and then decided to pick up the pace when I kept seeing the smoke and realizing it is coming from the trailer because the trailer is parked behind a building. And got there. And so when I got there, I saw the smoke coming out of the trailer. Door was open. I started to step inside. And when I did that, I went into firefighter mode. And I used to be a volunteer firefighter. Both my brothers are career firefighters, and there was this instinctual action that I did, and it just kind of took over. My wife was stepping out, I moved her to the side and went in and started peeling paneling off the off the walls, trying to get through to make sure that there was no fire in the walls, that everything was out and that it was cool. And I didn't realize it at the time, but there was this just this wave of anger that had come over me. And it wasn't about there's damage to the camper. It wasn't anything like that. It was fear. And it created a bit of an issue. Okay, it created a giant issue with my wife at the time who you know had made the comment, well, yes, I'm okay. Thanks for asking. But I was I was working on trauma brain. That's how I was functioning. That goes back to an incident when I was a volunteer firefighter. It was when Kristen was three. And I was in a small town doing this. There was a call for a uh a house that was on fire. I was first on the scene. The house was completely involved. Someone came up and said, There's kids inside. And so as a result of the fire, um, there were two kids inside that died, and we had to bring them out, place them in the ambulance, wait for the coroner. And I happened to be the witness for the coroner, and those are just images inside that ambulance that will always stick with me. Now I was able to call my brothers after the fact, talk to them. They had experienced fatalities from a fire, but it was something that I never got professional help on. So all of that just instantly popped back up. And part of it, the trigger for me was the smell of the smoke from the camper, that burning. It's a it's it's a different smell of something that's burning that's not supposed to be burning. So not like a campfire or anything like that. And it took me there. So it was about protecting people, even though my actions didn't come across that way. So that caused a lot of damage. And that was one of the things that I worked on with my therapist and had these discoveries, and that while anger was my response, fear was my feeling, if that makes sense. And if you've been in therapy or you are in therapy, then it might. So the last podcast was recorded in February 22. Uh, my wife asked for a divorce later that same month. So basically, I mean, while I had been doing some really serious therapy since 2020, healing and growing, uh it was probably a little too late and too much damage done in the marriage, and she had already started seeking you know safety and happiness elsewhere, and I just wasn't aware. So we we get a divorce that summer. So as a result of creating this environment of eggshells for everyone out of fear of losing them, I still lost them in the divorce. So that was my mass casualty event that I was the center of. So when taking a break from the podcast um to really focus on the therapy, one of the things um that was discovered, well, not discovered, that was brought to the surface, peeling back some layers, was just this uh realization of sexual abuse that I had experienced when I was six, and how that had that sexualization at that time, how that affected my life after that and my actions as well. So there was what was needed to happen was take a break from the grief work, the grief therapy, to focus on the trauma work. Doing both at the same time, very difficult. And professional uh therapists will recommend not doing that at the same time. You kind of have to open and close two different files. There was just layer after layer after layer peeled back, and a lot of work done, and a lot of healing done, and a lot of clarity came from all of that. It's been a lot of hard work. So there's been hurtful and rewarding all at the same time. Getting down to just all of those layers. I guess, you know, maybe the best way that I could describe it would be when you know there's all these things that are inside you, right? So you know that you've got to throw up. That's my analogy. So I hate throwing up, and I will put it off as long as I can, and maybe that's the same with many or most of you know you need to throw up, but you just hate doing it. And you and it just sits there and you hang on to it and you hang on to it, and you're miserable during that time until you throw up. And throwing up, terrible, awful. But after it's done, and all those toxins and all that stuff's out of your system, and you're you're sitting there on the bathroom floor, and there's a sense of relief. There's a sense of you feel a little bit better almost instantly, and maybe you need to throw up again. And when that's all done, the feeling that you have inside of all of that bad stuff being out is a really good feeling. And as much as I I hate throwing up, and yeah, I still avoid that when I can, even though in my mind I know I should just go ahead and do it. Um, once I do, it's the same every time, just feeling better after. So that's kind of how I would describe this hard work of therapy and and and even trauma therapy. Get the toxins out, and then the healing can actually begin. So in the fall, after the divorce, there was a faith-based men's retreat that a close friend had told me about that he had gone to. And I decided, okay, I'm gonna I'll do that. It was literally called on a Wednesday, said there's an opening on Thursday, come. So I did. And that was life-changing, that was impactful. We broke into small groups, and those guys that were in my in my group, which are my soul brothers, we will be forever bonded with the work that we did on trauma and things that we we have experienced in our lives, and the actions and reactions uh that that had caused. So we did a lot of work on that, um, came out of that again, just just with a a changed perspective. And one of the biggest things was for me was living just living a life of surrender and gratitude. And my business that I had, um, I just it had just been a struggle um since COVID. And, you know, many of you understand that. And I was just, I was like, I need to get out of this. And trying to find an exit strategy. And again, just kind of surrendering, and and and that was the thing, that was the key for me that I learned um with this, uh, with some of the things that I did with this intensive um uh retreat, was living in a place of surrender and gratitude, which is how I live now. And I just surrendered to, you know, what do you want? What's gonna happen here? And had a friend post something on LinkedIn about a particular airline that was was hiring. And I I'd known um this gentleman, he was a fellow lacrosse coach from years before. Um, so I'd known him for probably 20 years and and knew he worked for this airline, but um didn't really know what he did. And so he posted this, and I thought, well, okay, I'm just gonna reach out. So I I you know I call him and and I say, So, how does a 61-year-old guy with zero airline experience get in? And he's like, Oh, no, no, no. Um, you've got all this operational background from having your own business. You've been in the amusement parks for a number of years, you've got hospitality. He said, I think there's definitely a fit. And so um that was on a Thursday. I sent a resume to him. He goes, 'Cause he said, I'll just float it. And that was on Thursday. And then on Friday, I got a call from a recruiter from that airline, and that changed my path and opened up an entirely new career in airline management that I do now and that I absolutely love. You know, if someone had told me three years ago, five years ago, whatever, 10 years ago, that that's what I would be doing and this is where I would be right now, there would have been no way. There's just no way I couldn't wrap my mind around it. Yet, because of that surrender, here I am. And as people have told me, um, it's hard for me to say, but I guess it's true. But as people have told me, Bruce, you're living your best life. And while it might not look that way on paper, that is what's going on. And a lot of that certainly is attributed to that surrender and gratitude, but also a lot of work, a lot of hard work with my therapist, with just even as a facilitator working with other groups of parents who have experienced this unimaginable event and what I learned from them. So when it comes to the therapy, I can tell you from a guy's side that it, you know, we run away from it. Or if we have to face something like that, you know, we may go through the motions sometimes, but we're not really doing the work. And and that's this feeling of just trying to prevent being vulnerable. Um I'll use um a football analogy for this. So like we're we know we've got to go in and do this hard work and we're gonna go into battle. So we're gonna put on the helmet, we're gonna put on the pads, we tape it up, and we get ready to face our opponent, which basically is real emotion and trauma and loss and grief and sadness. So if we get pounded by it, we're protected, so to speak. But that's not really doing the work. What's really involved is allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, which would be more like rugby. No pads, and you feel all the hard hits, and sometimes you just get knocked on your ass in the process, but it's getting the work done. And so now I've I've done a lot of work. I'm I started doing, as I uh, as I may mentioned, um, earlier, I uh facilitate a dad's group with a nonprofit in northern Colorado. Um, been doing that um, you know, probably close to three years, um, where we just meet and we're in a safe space, and they um um the guys just kind of share their stories and what they're feeling and struggles and and successes, and everyone's got a very unique and different path um and a different experience. And again, all of it with our um walking together toward healing. Um and recently I also facilitate a small group here in Denver with uh with parents, and um again, same thing, safe place. You're like-minded in the in the way of that you get each other and you and you're not alone. So that's where the work outside of my career, um outside my new career, that's where the focus has been, and and a lot of healing. So a lot of work healing from the divorce, healing from continued healing from traumas that affected even my ability to uh heal and grow from the grief from the loss of my daughter. So just in a in a much different, much better place now, and really feeling like I was ready to relaunch. I was ready to do this, and then just talking with a lot of people, a lot of friends, a lot of other parents, you know, that I know. And, you know, this is where that idea came of having them share their stories. And so basically it's a like I'm facilitating a one-on-one. So we're just having conversations, letting them share their unique stories that I believe will resonate with someone somewhere, you know, as I discovered from one of the retreats I hosted for dads of two dads that had almost identical stories and opposite regrets, and were able, you know, they're able to connect and talk about why one had the regret he did, and the other had the regret he did, and they were just opposite. I won't get into into details on that because that's their story, and and if that's something that that one of them wants to share at some point, then we'll do that. So that's what's happening going forward. That's where I've been, and here's where I am now. Um so I'll also make a way for you to reach out and connect with me and let me know if you want to share your story. There's a way to do this. You don't have to be um here with me. We can do this remotely. And if you um if you just want to get that out, and sometimes just talking about it helps. Saying things out loud help. So I will offer my email address, um, because I have a new email address that's really dedicated just to this type of work, um, so that I'm easy to find. And, you know, feel free to reach out and say, hey, this resonates with me, or you know, I want to come share my story. And then as these, you know, as the different parents come on um and share theirs, you know, each one so far has said that they're willing for someone to reach out to them. So then it will, you know, so it'll be you'll contact me and then I'll put you in contact. I'm not gonna, we won't put their contact information out in the podcast. But if there's someone in particular that you want to reach out to, contact me and then I'll connect the two of you. So I hope you find this upcoming season and seasons ahead helpful. And if you have any questions about anything that's gone on that you want to know, please just reach out and let me know. Okay, so here's that email address. Really easy. So it's Bruce.barker61 at yahoo.com. So br-u-c-e.br six one at yahoo.com. Feel free to reach out uh with any questions, comments, and how I can help. So until next time, thanks for listening.