This episode tells the story of Sloan — a Marine, a former military mortician who spent years receiving and preparing the bodies of fallen service members, and a man living with traumatic brain injury and PTSD after losing three brothers-in-arms to suicide. Tammy met Sloan through Heroes Haven, and this episode walks through the night his healing wasn't enough to hold — the crisis in the garage, the police who couldn't approach, his wife Nicole's decision to go back despite a protective order, and the twenty-four hours Tammy spent by his side afterward.

It's an unflinching account of what crisis intervention actually looks like — not dramatic or decisive, but long, exhausting, and mostly just staying. Tammy also shares a second story, of another woman (also named Tammy) who stepped back from a bridge because someone called to check on her, and who has since dedicated her life to being that call for others.

The episode closes with what Tammy believes the research and her own experience both point to: that connection, not credentials, is what keeps people alive. You don't need a degree or a program to be the person who stays.

Content note: This episode describes a suicide attempt in detail, including specifics that some listeners, especially those at risk, may find activating. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.

In this episode, Tammy Flake steps away from interviews and campaign talk to share the private work — the books, the research, and the quiet commitments that underpin everything else she does. She starts with The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, and how it gave her language for something her own body had been trying to tell her for years through recurring shingles and sustained, suppressed stress. She follows it with Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, and how his idea of meaning as the thing that keeps people alive — even in the worst circumstances imaginable — reframed a moment she'd never fully explained before: standing in a doorway with her kids, at her lowest point.

Tammy also shares what she learned researching a federal veteran suicide prevention grant application for Heroes Haven — including a hard truth about where veterans are actually dying: not in cities with resources, but in rural areas where isolation is measured in miles, not feelings. She didn't get the grant, but she kept the data, and she's turned it into a personal, measurable commitment to see Utah's veteran suicide numbers go down.

The episode closes with a story about a neighbor whose son recently died by suicide, and what Tammy believes is the actual work underneath all the other work: not expertise, not the right words, just presence — the willingness to sit with someone in their worst moment and not leave.

In this episode, Tammy Flake steps back from her usual format to share what happened inside a room in Golden, Colorado — a three-day gathering called Organizers in Dialogue that brought together roughly eighty people from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum, with one shared agreement: they were there to listen, not to convince.

Tammy walks through what unfolded over those three days, including a conversation about AI companionship tools and their risks for people in crisis, and a one-on-one walk with a woman whose life experience looked nothing like her own on paper — and everything like it underneath. Again and again, across every political and religious divide in the room, one thing kept surfacing: suicide had touched nearly everyone there.

What Tammy brings home is a simple but hard-won idea — that suicide doesn't recognize party lines, income, faith, or politics, and that talking about it honestly might be one of the few things left that can actually bring people back to each other. This episode is about what it looks like when a room full of people who disagree on almost everything choose dignity over defense, and what that choice can open up.

In this episode, Tammy Flake steps away from the interview chair to make an announcement: she's running for National Commander-in-Chief of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. An Iraq War veteran, peer support facilitator, and suicide prevention advocate, Tammy lays out why she's putting her name forward, what the VFW actually does at the post level versus what most people — veterans included — assume it does, and why she believes the organization has drifted from the people who need it most.

She shares stories of what VFW posts do far outside the stereotype: covering a stranded veteran's car repair, providing honor guard for a grieving family, mentoring the next generation through student essay programs. She talks candidly about last year's contested national election, the "gentleman's agreement" around conference rotation that broke down, and why she decided it was time to run herself rather than wait.

At the center of her platform is a single idea she calls "the reframe" — not changing what the VFW stands for, but changing how it shows up, especially for post-9/11 veterans who don't yet see themselves in it. Her first promise as commander: visit every department in her first year, not to be celebrated, but to ask one question — what do you need?

Underneath the campaign talk is the reason she's doing any of this at all: veteran suicide, and her belief that belonging, not just a hotline, is what actually saves lives.

In this solo episode, host Tammy Flake opens up her own toolkit — the practices and perspectives that carried her from a dark place to a life she loves. She introduces the idea of the "paradigm shift," using her own journey from a wary teenage recruit to someone who now trusts the process, to explain how our sense of what's safe and possible can move more than we think.

Tammy walks through the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) questionnaire, shares her own score, and explains why she believes a number like that is a map, not a verdict. She talks about a recent experience with a wild mustang through a rewilding program, and how it became a mirror for understanding her own need to feel safe and seen. She also introduces the AVAR framework — authentic, vulnerable, accountable, reciprocal — as a way of thinking about the kind of community that helps people heal instead of hide.

Along the way, she recommends Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score, reflects on how unprocessed trauma showed up in her own body years later, and makes the case for journaling as a tool for reflection in a world that rarely slows down.

This episode is part personal check-in, part toolbox, and part invitation: to pause instead of react, to be witnessed instead of fixed, and to believe that hope is something you can build, one small practice at a time.

Major General Jeff Burton spent 37 years in an Army uniform — enlisting in 1982, commanding the 1457th Engineer Combat Battalion through the Iraq invasion, and later serving as Utah's Adjutant General over 7,500 soldiers and airmen. He brought all 450 of his soldiers home. But his hardest deployment happened in his own living room, when his teenage son died by suicide ten months before Burton left for Iraq.

In this conversation, host Tammy Flake sits down with General Burton for a rare, unguarded look at command, grief, and what it actually takes to lead people through combat while carrying a loss he didn't let himself feel until years later. He talks candidly about his son's bipolar disorder, the "hot wash" sessions he pioneered to give enlisted soldiers a voice, his own resistance to — and eventual breakthrough with — EMDR therapy, and the suicide support group he and his wife ran for seventeen years. He also reflects on his time in the Utah House of Representatives, where he helped write the state's suicide prevention legislation, and on what he believes the country still gets wrong about mental health.

This is a conversation about the cost of compartmentalizing pain — and what's possible on the other side of it.