LINKS: https://www.johnagullo.com

In this episode of Stories Across the Table, Bridget Cook-Burch and Steve Ramona welcome John Gullo — entrepreneur, philanthropist, author, and the man who put professional pickleball on the map — whose story begins not with a silver spoon but with the streets of Buffalo, New York, where the line between a life of impact and a life of consequence was razor thin, and the choice he made at twenty changed everything.

John grew up in a neighborhood where Goodfellas wasn't a movie — it was the block he lived on. His brother dealt in stolen goods, ran black-market beef, and once unknowingly possessed a painting worth $350,000 that made Fox News. John watched all of it, and then — quietly, stubbornly — chose something different.

That something different was the Junior Chamber of Commerce, whose motto hooked him for life: community leadership training through community service. A self-described total introvert until twenty, John found in the JCs not just a direction but an identity — and never looked back. What followed was a life of perpetual reinvention: Burger King franchise manager, foundation builder, pickleball pioneer, and now author. After five bypass surgeries and weighing over three hundred pounds, he discovered pickleball, built the first four courts in northern Utah, launched the first professional tournament, and watched an eleven-year-old named Annalie Waters win it. She's now the top female player in the country, a Nike athlete who made over three million dollars last year. John was inducted into the Pickleball Hall of Fame in 2024 — and lost a hundred pounds along the way.

He believes there are only two kinds of mistakes: positive ones, where you try and fail, and negative ones, where you do nothing at all. He has lived entirely on the positive side of that ledger.

This episode is for anyone who grew up where the choices weren't clean, found one door cracked open, and walked through it anyway.

BIO

John Gullo didn’t learn leadership in a classroom. He grew up street-smart in Buffalo, learned business the hard way, and never stopped betting on people. From flipping Whoppers to flipping communities, he built a Burger King empire, launched major philanthropic initiatives, and helped pioneer professional pickleball into what it is today—often while learning lessons the hard way. Known for his blunt honesty, big heart, and refusal to play small, John believes leadership is proven not by titles, but by how well you serve when no one is watching. 

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LINKS:

https://BRICKHOUSERECOVERY.com 

https://www.unhooked.family/weekly-lives--b8766 

In this episode of Stories Across the Table, Bridget Cook-Burch and Steve Ramona welcome Jason Coombs, addiction recovery advocate, entrepreneur, and author of Unhooked, a book written not for the person struggling but for everyone who loves them.

Jason did not grow up around addiction. He grew up in a comfortable home with successful parents and no obvious reason for the road he ended up on. What he did grow up with, unnamed and untreated, were anxiety, ADHD, and a kind of pain that nobody around him had the language for. He found his own language for it eventually, and it cost him nearly everything.

With candor, compassion, and a clarity that can only come from having lived it, Jason shares how self-medication became addiction, how addiction became felonies, and how his parents' decision to finally stop absorbing the consequences of his choices was the moment his real recovery could begin. He also shares why he wrote his book for the family standing on the shore and not the person drowning, because in his experience, that is where the turning point actually lives.

Around the table, Bridget, Steve, and Jason explore the boulder-and-wave metaphor that changed his parents' lives, why family members often enable out of love and fear rather than weakness, and what it means to help someone want to change rather than simply demanding that they do.

This episode is for anyone who has watched someone they love disappear into addiction and had no idea what to do next.

Pull up a chair. This is a story of hitting every bottom available, finding the one thing that finally held, and turning the wreckage of a life into a map for the people who needed it most.

BIO: 
Jason Coombs is a recovery advocate, author, and speaker who helps families and individuals navigate the complex challenges of addiction and mental health. With a Master’s in Professional Communications and lived experience in recovery, he brings a blend of empathy, insight, and practical tools to his work. 

Jason is the founder of Brick House Recovery, a faith-based outpatient treatment program recognized with national and regional awards for excellence in care. He’s the author of a
national bestseller, Unhooked: How to Help an Addicted Loved One Recover and host of the Get Unhooked podcast.

He currently serves on multiple committees and as Southwest Regional Director for the Idaho Association of Addiction Professionals. Outside of work, Jason enjoys skiing, triathlons, and traveling with his family.

ABOUT BRICK HOUSE RECOVERY
The high-quality, behavioral-health professionals employed at Brick House have received the:
• National Excellence in Treatment Award 2023
• Idaho’s Best in Mental Wellness 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
• Awarded Best Places to Work in Idaho 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
• Inspire Excellence Award 2021
• CARF Nationally Accredited 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
• Meridian Business of the Year 2018
• Healthcare Business of the Year 2023

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Content Advisory: This episode includes discussion of sexual assault and other traumatic experiences on the road to transformation. These topics are approached with care and respect, but listener discretion is advised. 

LINKS
https://www.sallyandersoninternational.com/
https://scandalcoach.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallyanderson-exclusive-strategic-counsel/

In this episode of Stories Across the Table, Bridget Cook-Burch and Steve Ramona welcome Sally Anderson, author of Beyond Brave: The Art of Living Courageously, a scandal coach, business coach, and a woman whose life reads like a testament to what survival can look like when it refuses to stop at merely surviving.

Sally grew up in New Zealand, a self-described "why kid" who never fit the mold. At fifteen, on her first day off from her first job, she was abducted and brutally assaulted for ten hours by members of a notorious gang, an ordeal she describes as a death of sorts, one she returned from changed at the level of the soul. There was no support system waiting for her afterward, no framework in the early '80s for how to help a fifteen-year-old carry something so enormous. So she built her own framework instead, spending decades in corporate leadership, consulting, and coaching, all while quietly carrying the weight of what had happened to her.

Then, in 2018, at the height of a thriving global coaching career, Sally was publicly and viciously character-assassinated, a campaign that went as far as CNN, Fox News, and BBC World, and that centered in part on a sacred moko she'd received within her husband's Māori family. She stepped back from public life for seven and a half years. During that time, her husband Roger suffered a series of medical crises before dying suddenly, just before New Zealand's COVID lockdowns, in a loss Sally describes as unlike any grief she'd known before, despite having already lost siblings, parents, and friends.

Around the table, Bridget, Steve, and Sally move through forgiveness, faith, cancel culture, and what Sally calls the difference between "doing leadership" and "being leadership." She talks about legacy not as what we leave behind when we die, but as the innate calling each of us carries, and about her own: alchemizing pain into purpose, and using her story to give language and courage to others living through their own silent devastation.

This episode is for anyone who has ever wondered whether it's possible to come back from the unthinkable, and what it might look like to let that experience become a gift to someone else.

Pull up a chair. This is a story about a woman who should not, by any reasonable measure, still be here, and about what she chose to build with the life she refused to let go of.

BIO
Sally Anderson serves as ‘exclusive strategic counsel’ to the world’s elite leaders, visionaries, high level influencers – those who refuse to settle for mere success but instead demand ascension, transcendence and incomparable legacy-defining impact! Forged from the full spectrum of human devastation, she carries an authority that cannot be credentialed or replicated. After 37 years working with the exceptional leaders, her proprietary methodology, Equanimity and Co-Creative Leadership Mastery, moves leaders from the 3D analytical realm into the limitless 5D co-creative, where the impossible becomes their new standard.

She is also the author of 3 books:

Beyond Brave: The Art of Courageous Living - https://www.kmdbooks.com/beyondbrave

Freefall: Living Life Beyond The Edge - https://amzn.asia/d/0fUe50Hc

The Co-Creative Age: The Next Evolutionary Phase in Leadership - 
https://amzn.asia/d/0ihFggzp

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• Steve’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bizopportunitynow/
• Bridget’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bridgetcookburch/ 
• Substack: https://p...

Content Advisory: This episode includes discussion of suicidal ideation and other traumatic experiences on the road to transformation. These topics are approached with care and respect, but listener discretion is advised.

LINKS
Www.robeastmancoaching.com
https://www.instagram.com/tattooedlifecoach8?igsh=MTQ4ZXF4cmdvOG9jMA%3D%3D&utm_source=qr

In this episode of Stories Across the Table, Bridget Cook-Burch and Steve Ramona welcome Rob Eastman, mental health advocate, author of Warrior in the Garden, and someone who has spent the years since his own darkest night turning his hardest story into his most useful work.

Rob was told from an early age, in every way a child absorbs a message without hearing the words, that he was different, broken, too much. What followed was decades of shape-shifting, trying to become whoever the room needed him to be, a battle with addiction, a night on a mountain in Utah that he did not plan to walk away from, and a moment of grace so specific and so undeniable that it stopped him in his tracks.

With rawness, humor, and a tenderness that surprises you in a man who also took up cage fighting at thirty-five, Rob shares what he learned in that darkness and what he now says to the kids and parents who find themselves standing in it.

Around the table, Bridget, Steve, and Rob explore why shame grows in silence, what parents can do differently when their child is struggling, and why the proving ground of a hard life, for those willing to do the work, can become the sharpest tool in the room.

This episode is for anyone who has ever felt like they were too broken to come back, or who loves someone who feels that way right now.

Pull up a chair. This is a story of a boy who needed to fit in, a man who learned to stand out, and a daughter named Sophie who just received her first recruiting letter from Harvard. The journey was not easy. It was absolutely worth it.

BIO
Rob Eastman is a coach, speaker, entrepreneur, and advocate for mental health and human resilience. After overcoming addiction, depression, suicide attempts, and major life adversity, Rob transformed his pain into purpose through fitness, mentorship, and service. He is the founder of Rob Eastman Coaching and the Eastman Family Recovery Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to supporting mental health, recovery, and family healing. A lifelong athlete, wrestling coach, and author of Warrior in the Garden, Rob shares authentic insights on resilience, leadership, fatherhood, faith, and the power of turning adversity into strength and purpose.

"Warrior In The Garden" Book

https://amzn.to/3RIEP95
https://www.audible.com/pd/B0DB38FX3X?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=library_overflow

• YouTube: @StoriesAcrossTheTable https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHPeekMqKYjBAwO28gLSvRA
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• Substack: https://p...

Steve Cohen grew up on a street in Philadelphia that was twenty feet wide, lined with thirty-six rowhouses on each side. That was his world, and he will tell you that everything he has become in the fifty years since was already there on that block: the camaraderie, the listening, the willingness to stand for something and take what comes next.

What came next, for a young Jewish boy in postwar Philadelphia, was often a fight. Not a figurative one. A real one. Steve spent a good portion of his early years physically defending himself and his community, learning in the most visceral way possible what it means to believe in something enough to put yourself on the line for it. That street kid never left him. He just learned, over decades, to channel the same spirit into something more effective than a punch.

For fifty years, Steve Cohen worked as a television journalist, moving from the neighborhood streets of Philadelphia into the newsrooms and boardrooms of New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and Detroit, arriving in the places where the world was changing and finding his mission in explaining it to the people he served. He was, in his own words, the interlocutor between what was happening out there and the people trying to make sense of it. He describes that as one of the most humbling gifts he can imagine, a hand on the shoulder from something larger than himself, a calling that was not chosen so much as recognized.

Along the way, he recognized something similar in others. He sat with a young Bill O'Reilly in Boston and told him New York was waiting. He reached a young reporter named Meredith Vieira in Providence and helped her see that her aspirations could be larger than where she was. He sat at an Italian restaurant with a twenty-three-year-old radio journalist named Lester Holt, watched him discover chicken parmesan for what may have been the first time, and found the opening that would eventually bring Holt into television. Steve's gift, the one that threads through all of those stories, is knowing that the door to who someone really is can be opened by almost anything. Sometimes it is a conversation about purpose. Sometimes it is a plate of pasta.

He is now seventy-nine years old, living in San Diego, and running for the United States Congress. When Steve talks about where his sense of service comes from, he tells about his father Morris, a World War II veteran who fought with Merrill's Marauders in Burma, one of the most brutal behind-the-lines campaigns of the war. He was given the gift of life by this man who survived when most of his brothers in arms did not, and he has understood from a very young age that this is not something you set down or outgrow. You carry it. You honor it. You try to be worth it. That, Steve Cohen says, is the whole story.

BIO: 
Steve Cohen, a revered figure in television journalism, marked his 50th year last year in 2023 as a news chief. His distinguished career includes key roles across major markets, such as WCBS, KCBS, KCOP, KUSI, WNAC, WXYZ. Steve's leadership journey saw him as VP/President/GM at WCAU, KTVX, and WGRZ. He currently offers media insight for his MediaWiseGuy Consulting, offering comprehensive guidance on crisis management, speech writing, and organizational dynamics in media. Steve’s work through the years has consisted of establishing unique programming and content distribution in the United States, China, Europe and the Mid East.

Reflecting on the evolution of media, he emphasizes a return to fact-based reporting and honest dialogue. His memoir, The Newslife: From Arkansas to Aruba, captures his remarkable journey. And is capped by his reflective memoir, 50 years in a Newsroom; A Eulogy.

Additional information and more recent press can be found at: https://timesofsandiego.com/business/2023/07/23/marketink-kusis-steve-cohen-on-how-tv-news-has-changed-over-50-years/
Credit: MarketInk: KUSI’s Steve Cohen on How TV News Has Changed Over 50 Years.

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Becky's Book: "Undone, Unafraid" on Amazon 
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FZYSSNZM 

LINKS:
Website: www.beckymoller.com 
IG: https://www.instagram.com/undoneacademy/ 
YT: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8wzQA5FDVaTYUPox_NACSA (The Undone Path with Becky Moller)

Most of us move through life carrying wounds we have never fully named. We react to things we cannot quite explain. We feel disconnected from ourselves in ways we cannot articulate. And we quietly wonder if everyone else has it figured out, or if it is just us.

Becky Muller has spent years sitting with that question, first as someone who lived it, and now as someone who helps others find their way through it.

Becky grew up in Wisconsin, one of many children in a deeply rooted family of faith, surrounded by trees and water and the kind of Midwest that stays in your bones no matter where you end up. She lives in Utah now, but she will tell you that the moment she crosses back into the rolling hills of Iowa, something in her exhales. Home is home.

Her story, though, is not primarily a story about where she is from. It is a story about what happened in her marriage, what she did with it, and who she became on the other side.

When her husband disclosed an addiction to pornography that had grown into an online emotional affair, Becky's world collapsed. Not because of the specifics of what had or hadn't happened, but because of what it cost her internally. Her identity, so much of which was bound up in being a wife and a woman of faith, was suddenly in pieces. What followed was not just heartbreak. It was the kind of confusion that comes from spending years in a relationship where something is quietly, consistently off, where your instincts are telling you one thing and the person you trust most is telling you another. That experience has a name. Betrayal trauma. And Becky will be the first to tell you there is no hierarchy in it. What floors one person may not floor another, and that is not weakness. It is just the truth of how trauma works.

What she and her husband did next is remarkable. They chose to stay, and more than that, they chose to do the real work, separately and together. 

Everyone, she says, is moving through life with unexamined wounds that shape how they show up in their relationships and in the world. The question is whether they are willing to look at them.

That insight became Undone Academy, the weekly community she runs now for people who are ready to go deeper than just managing symptoms. It also became her book, Undone, Unafraid: Evolving Through Trauma, Betrayal, Femininity, and Faith. To be undone is not the end. It is often exactly where the real work begins.

Take a seat at the table and enjoy this story; its for anyone who has ever felt like life pulled the rug out from under them, and who is ready to talk about what comes next.

BIO: 
Becky Moller is an author, teacher, and mindfulness guide whose work bridges trauma recovery, embodiment, and spiritual awakening. Her path began in 2014 through deep personal immersion in the 12-step world of addiction and trauma recovery, later serving as Executive Director of a global recovery foundation. As a certified yoga instructor, university-level educator, and Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher, Becky integrates embodiment with proven recovery principles. She is the founder of Undone Academy, a yearlong framework supporting healing and growth through life’s unravelings. Her bestselling memoir, "Undone, Unafraid" chronicles her journey from collapse to conscious, embodied living.

• YouTube: @StoriesAcrossTheTable https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHPeekMqKYjBAwO28gLSvRA
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• Steve’s X/Twitter: https://x.com/oppbroker
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• Steve’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bizopportunitynow/
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• Substack: https://p...

What does it mean to truly see someone? Not their résumé or their social media presence or the polished version they bring to every room, but the real person underneath, the one carrying the weight of old stories they have never been able to put down?

That is the question at the heart of this episode of Stories Across the Table, and our guest Andrew Anderson has spent his life trying to answer it.

Andrew is a breakthrough coach, and his gift is not something he named for himself. It took three close friends, huckleberry milkshakes, and a moment of honest conversation for him to hear it said out loud: Andrew, your superpower is that you see people. Once he sees someone, he says, he cannot unsee them. It does not live in his mind or even his heart. It lives somewhere deeper, in his soul, and from that place he goes to battle for the people who let him.

In this conversation Andrew shares the story that shaped him. At 28 he was living in his parents' basement, convinced he had failed at the three things that mattered most to him as a husband, a father, and a teacher. He talks honestly about what it took to stop pitying that version of himself and start honoring him, and about the surprising realization that came out of that hard season. His life's mission was always bigger than any single role. It just took losing everything to see it.

We also spend real time on what Andrew actually does with people in a breakthrough session. He describes it the way Michelangelo described sculpture, removing everything that is not already the person standing in front of him. He uses mental and emotional release therapy to help people let go of the beliefs and patterns that once kept them safe but have long since run their course. What takes traditional therapy months or years, Andrew works through in hours, by asking the questions no one else will ask and staying present long enough for people to finally feel safe enough to answer them honestly.

He also tells the story behind his book, Strength of the Oak, Strength of the Willow, which came to him while he was standing knee deep in the Virgin River at Zion National Park, overcome by something he still struggles to put into words. He just knew, standing there in the water looking up at those red rocks, that he was supposed to write it.

Andrew closes the conversation with something that has stayed with us. He talks about watching his three-year-old son run out to greet him in the garage after a morning bike ride and seeing in that little face everything we are all born with and so often forget. Curiosity. Love. Reckless abandon. That, he says, is the invitation for all of us.

BIO:
Everybody yearns to have at least one person in their life who believes in them; that they can do what they say they can do, who believes they can be the person they want to be. Andrew L. Anderson is that person. As an Executive Breakthrough Coach, Andrew helps high-performers break through inner limitations and reconnect with their true identity and deeply rooted spiritual purpose. He is a devoted husband to his wife and a present father of seven. Andrew leads with bold truth, authentic compassion, and uncanny intuition, helping others awaken to the divine strength and infinite potential within them.

andrewlanderson.com

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• Steve’s X/Twitter: https://x.com/oppbroker
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• Steve’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bizopportunitynow/
• Bridget’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bridgetcookburch/ 
• Substack: https://p...

In this episode of Stories Across the Table, Bridget Cook-Burch and Steve Ramona welcome Allicia Johnson Niles, advocate, author in progress, and the surviving daughter of Lieutenant Junior Grade Burr N. Johnson III, who was killed by homicide in the US Navy at Pearl Harbor when Allicia was two years old.

Allicia grew up not knowing the full story of her father's death. Society told her she was lucky not to remember him. But she felt him, in songs that caught her off guard, in a quiet sense of guidance that grew harder to ignore over the years. When she finally began to investigate, the Navy said no. She kept going anyway. Over a year of determined digging, she tracked down her father's shipmates, pieced together what happened in that tiny wardrobe room, and eventually found Tony Gusty, the man who had tried to save her father's life and had never spoken of it to anyone. Their conversation healed them both.

What she discovered went far deeper than she expected. There was cover-up, conspiracy, and a cast of characters that kept the story unfolding even as she was writing it. Through all of it, she carried complex PTSD and anxiety she had only learned to name in her thirties, and she moved forward anyway.

Her memoir, Angel in Arlington, written with Bridget Cook-Burch, is a story of unlikely courage and a powerful argument that grief does not expire, love does not end, and you do not have to wait for the fear to go away before you begin.

Pull up a chair for a conversation about the fathers we never knew, the courage it takes to find the truth, and the healing that becomes possible when we finally stop running from our own story.

BIO: 
Allicia Johnson Niles is an author and speaker with a profound message of hope.
From childhood, her entire life was affected by her father’s murder while he was serving in the U. S. Navy. Deep-rooted grief and curiosity caused her to seek the truth behind the conspiracies aboard the USS Richard S Edwards and her father’s death. Suddenly she felt an intense connection with her father on almost a daily basis.

As she learned to act upon specific messages, miracles, answers, healing, and forgiveness flooded into her life like a tidal wave. She not only found peace for her own life, but also for over a dozen of her father’s Navy friends who had still been suffering the ramifications of the shooting.

Feeling the same urging from her father to reveal their story with those who have lost loved ones and who desire continued connection, Allicia shares her personal understanding of PTSD, terrors, feelings of inadequacy and a sense of abandonment. She is passionate about helping others, particularly Military widows and orphans, to embrace grief and truth, instead of running from it. Her deeper message of hope is that our lost loved ones surround us daily, cheering us on as we find meaning in life.
​
Allicia is proud of the veterans in her family, including four grandparents, her father, and her sister-in-law. Her understanding heart, quirky sense of humor, and unconquerable determination have opened doors and created life-changing connections that continue to be blessings.
 
A nationally sought-after speaker, Allicia Johnson Niles works in marketing and leadership development. She is a devout Christian who feels a deep sense of family connection, and strives to help others feel hope and confidence in their own lives. She is a part of the TAPS movement (Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors) for military families to share the process of deep and effective healing.

Website: https://www.angelinarlington.com

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• Bridget’s Free Community - Inspired Writers Clubhouse for Writers and Authors: https://www.inspiredwritersclubhouse.com
• Bridget’s Free Newsletter: https://www.yourinspiredstory.com/newsletter 
• Steve’s Free Community: https://www.skool.com/steve-ramona-community-9836
• Steve’s Free Newsletter: https://doing-business-with-a-servants-heart.kit.com/steveramona
• Steve’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveramona/’
• Bridget’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbridgetcookburch/  
• Steve’s X/Twitter: https://x.com/oppbroker
• Bridget’s X/Twitter: @inspiritwriter 
• Steve’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bizopportunitynow/
• Bridget’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bridgetcookburch/ 
• Substack: https://p...

In this episode of Stories Across the Table, Bridget Cook-Burch and Steve Ramona welcome Jason Palmer, professional horseman, coach, and author of The Finish Line, a man who found his way back to himself through the one relationship that never required him to be anything other than who he was.

At ten years old, Jason survived a life-threatening chainsaw accident that left him disfigured and, in the years that followed, a target for relentless bullying. His parents, watching him withdraw from the world, introduced him to competing on horses. What he discovered in that arena changed everything. Horses never judged him. They looked straight through to who he was, and in that space of unconditional acceptance, Jason found he could not only compete but win. Eventually the bullying stopped, because the same people who once mocked him needed him to do what he did best.

He went on to ride as a jockey from age fourteen, training and racing some of the fastest horses in the country alongside legendary figures in the industry, before retiring at twenty-four and eventually finding his next calling in the reining horse world. Over a career spanning decades, Jason estimates he has ridden more than thirty thousand horses, each one teaching him something about trust, patience, and the art of rebuilding a broken spirit.

His book, written with Bridget Cook-Burch and Hannah Lyon, reached someone he had never met just two weeks after it launched. That story, told here for the first time, is reason enough to listen.

Pull up a chair for a conversation about finding your footing in a world that knocked you down, and the extraordinary things that happen when you choose to keep going.

• YouTube: @StoriesAcrossTheTable https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHPeekMqKYjBAwO28gLSvRA
• Bridget’s Free Community - Inspired Writers Clubhouse for Writers and Authors: https://www.inspiredwritersclubhouse.com
• Bridget’s Free Newsletter: https://www.yourinspiredstory.com/newsletter 
• Steve’s Free Community: https://www.skool.com/steve-ramona-community-9836
• Steve’s Free Newsletter: https://doing-business-with-a-servants-heart.kit.com/steveramona
• Steve’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveramona/’
• Bridget’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbridgetcookburch/  
• Steve’s X/Twitter: https://x.com/oppbroker
• Bridget’s X/Twitter: @inspiritwriter 
• Steve’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bizopportunitynow/
• Bridget’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bridgetcookburch/ 
• Substack: https://p...

In this episode of Stories Across the Table, Bridget Cook-Burch and Steve Ramona welcome Serena Mastin, author of Exposed: You Can't Heal When You Hide, a woman who has spent her life learning that the very pattern that kept her safe as a child was the same one quietly unraveling everything she loved as an adult.

Serena's earliest years were shaped by survival. Her biological father was the leader of a satanic cult, and the abuse she suffered before the age of five set her family on the run, eventually landing her in witness protection and a series of foster homes where she was moved without warning, sometimes in the middle of the night. By fifteen she was living on the streets, enrolling herself in high school, working three jobs, and hiding every bit of it from the world.

Hiding became her armor and her habit. She carried it into her marriage, concealing her husband's affairs and addiction to protect everyone around her until the day he took his own life in 2020. And then, just as she was finishing her book and beginning to step into the light, she lost her fiance Thomas unexpectedly at thirty-six years old, only eight weeks before this conversation was recorded.

What Serena offers through all of it is not a story of being broken, but a story of learning that you cannot earn love, you can only receive it, and that you cannot heal what you are still hiding. Her book began as a private act of healing she planned to keep under her bed. Publishing it was the first time she refused to hide.

Pull up a chair for one of the most raw and honest conversations this podcast has had, and for a reminder that being alone is a state of being, but loneliness is only a state of mind.


BIO:
Serena Mastin is the founder of Pulse Marketing, an award-winning agency blending traditional and digital strategies to help businesses grow. Driven by a passion for entrepreneurship and shaped by her own journey of healing, she is committed to empowering others to embrace resilience and transformation. Through her leadership, Serena fosters connection, growth, and authenticity, guiding both clients and peers to navigate the challenges of business and life with strength and purpose.


LINKS:
Agency Website: www.heartofcreative.com  
Author Website: www.serenamastin.com
IG: https://www.instagram.com/heartfeltstories2026/ 
IG: https://www.instagram.com/pulse_marketing/ 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PulseMarketingTeam
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heartofcreative/ 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/serenamastin/   
Amazon: amazon.com/author/serenamastin 
Audible: https://www.audible.com/pd/Exposed-Audiobook/B0CF3NDWGM?action_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp

• YouTube: @StoriesAcrossTheTable https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHPeekMqKYjBAwO28gLSvRA
• Bridget’s Free Community - Inspired Writers Clubhouse for Writers and Authors: https://www.inspiredwritersclubhouse.com
• Bridget’s Free Newsletter: https://www.yourinspiredstory.com/newsletter 
• Steve’s Free Community: https://www.skool.com/steve-ramona-community-9836
• Steve’s Free Newsletter: https://doing-business-with-a-servants-heart.kit.com/steveramona
• Steve’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveramona/’
• Bridget’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbridgetcookburch/  
• Steve’s X/Twitter: https://x.com/oppbroker
• Bridget’s X/Twitter: @inspiritwriter 
• Steve’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bizopportunitynow/
• Bridget’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bridgetcookburch/ 
• Substack: https://p...