The Weight I Carry

The cost

People often assume trauma only comes from one terrible moment. When someone learns you are a firefighter, they usually ask the same question: "what's the worst thing you've seen?" The assumption behind the question is that somewhere in your career there was one call that changed everything. They imagine a single fire, a single accident, a single tragedy that explains the scars. The truth is more complicated than that. For most firefighters, trauma does not arrive in one moment. It accumulates slowly over years. For me it was over 18 years as a Phoenix firefighter.

There was never one call that broke me. It wasn't the fire where the heat pushed through my gear and burned my skin. To me that fire was when my friend and I were burned because we were incredibly honored to have the privilege to do what we've trained for and it was absolutely incredible.

It wasn't the countless scenes where we arrived, and someone didn't make it. It wasn't even the hundreds of moments where the worst day of someone else's life became part of our normal workday. The screams, the sadness we try to deflect as we try our best to make a difference. The job itself was never the problem.

What changes firefighters over time is the armor we build to survive it.

You learn to put that armor on without realizing it. Early in the career it feels like part of learning the job. You cannot walk into burning buildings or chaotic scenes if you allow every emotion to overwhelm you. So you learn to compartmentalize, focusing on the task in front of you rather than the feelings and the impact it has around it. Inside firehouses across the country the humor becomes dark, sometimes shockingly dark to outsiders. That humor is not cruelty; it is survival. It is how firefighters carry what they see without collapsing under the weight of it.

The armor works exactly the way it is supposed to, it allows you to think clearly when others panic and to move forward when instinct tells most people to run. It allows you to witness tragedy and still function on the next call an hour later. Over time, however, that armor stops being something you put on and take off. It becomes part of your identity. The problem is that no one teaches firefighters how to remove it when they leave the station. Eventually the armor follows you home.

Cumulative trauma does not announce itself clearly. It shows up in irritability, emotional fatigue, and the quiet sense that staying busy is easier than slowing down. I still loved my family deeply and believed I was doing the best I could in the moment. I continued trying to be a good father and remain present in my daughters' lives. But something inside me had begun shifting in ways I did not fully understand. Distance was slowly replacing vulnerability. Even as a professional counselor, something I had been doing even before the fire service, people ask me now how I didn't see it. You've helped so many others. How did you miss it in your own life? The honest answer is that I convinced myself I had it under control. I told myself I was managing it. I was juggling too much to slow down and really look at what was happening. Work, family, responsibility, people counting on me. I kept pushing forward. Handle the next problem. Deal with it later. I thought I had more time.

The quiet breaking

In March of 2024 I moved out. For most of my adult life my identity had been built around clear roles: father, husband, firefighter, counselor, provider. When the marriage ended, two of those roles suddenly felt unstable at the same time. The house that I had helped build and that once felt like home now felt like a place I was uninvited from, like I was the enemy.

And I didn't know how to fix it, which is a hard place for someone like me to be.

Losing my family hurt, but what hit deeper was losing what my family looked like day to day. Not just the people, but the structure, the rhythm, the feeling of knowing where I belonged inside it.

What hurt most was losing daily life with my daughters. The ordinary moments that define fatherhood were suddenly gone. There were no quick conversations in the car, no spontaneous laughter in the kitchen, no familiar routines at the end of the day. Those moments had quietly shaped my identity for years without me fully realizing how much they meant to me.

And there were moments in that time where I didn't want to be here anymore.

It got serious enough that I started putting things in place. I set up a living trust. I organized things for my girls. That wasn't some abstract "just in case" planning, it was real. It came from a place of not fully trusting how dark my thinking had gotten at times. That's a hard thing to sit with. Realizing you're trying to protect your kids not just from the world, but from a version of yourself you don't fully recognize.

That was when I knew this wasn't just grief. It had gone deeper.

There were moments I'd catch myself thinking through logistics instead of living, making sure they'd be okay, making sure everything was accounted for, trying to create order in the middle of a mind that didn't feel steady. That was a red flag for me.

That season lasted months. Heavy, quiet, and isolating. On the outside, I could still show up. Go to work. Function. But internally, it felt like I was carrying something I couldn't put down.

For years I had helped other first responders deal with trauma and emotional exhaustion. I had sat with them, listened to their stories, and encouraged them to take their healing seriously. Yet when it came to my own internal work, I had always found reasons to postpone it. I told myself there were too many responsibilities and too many people counting on me. Deep down, though, I knew the truth was simpler than that. I had been avoiding confronting the weight I carried.

The collapse of my marriage forced that confrontation. I reached a point where continuing to avoid my struggles no longer felt possible. That is when I made the decision to begin ketamine therapy as a way to explore what had been building inside me for years. Before the first ketamine session I drew a picture that attempted to capture what I was feeling internally. It was not meant to be artistic; it was more like a map of my mind of what I felt had a hold of me. At the center of the drawing was a figure representing what I felt.

Around the figure were words and symbols representing work, fear, anger, responsibility, and family. Chains pulled at the center of the page, while hearts appeared scattered around the edges. At the time I did not fully understand what I had drawn. It simply felt like the most honest way to represent the pressure I felt internally. Looking back now, it was the first moment I acknowledged how many forces were pulling on my identity at once. The drawing became a snapshot of a mind trying to make sense of all my parts and my clashing responsibilities and emotions.

The journey

One of the hardest things to explain to someone who has never experienced ketamine therapy is what the journey itself actually feels like. The experience is abstract in the moment, and the language we normally use to describe reality does not always fit. At times my mind felt like it was traveling through places that do not exist in the physical world, yet the emotions and realizations that surfaced during those moments were deeply real. Looking back through my journals now, I can see how each journey revealed different pieces of the story I had been carrying inside me.

Looking back now, those sensations continued to mirror what was happening in my life outside the treatment room. The life I had built for years was collapsing. My identity was shifting. Parts of the person I thought I was were disappearing. Inside the journey that collapse appeared symbolically as pieces of myself dying and re-emerging in new forms.

Fragments of memories began appearing during those moments. Pieces of my life would flash through my mind like scenes from an old movie reel. Some of them were moments I had not thought about in years. Others were reminders of relationships and experiences that had shaped who I had become. The mind seemed to be revisiting these moments as if it were sorting through them, deciding what still belonged and what needed to be released.

During the journey I realized that being the rock in a relationship can steady everything around you, but it can also harden you in ways you don't always see. Stability can help people feel safe, but it can also become rigidity if we refuse to bend. As a firefighter and a counselor I had spent years being the steady one for everyone else. These journeys allowed me to question whether that identity had also kept me from fully feeling my own emotions or allowing myself to take the armor off when I came home.

These sessions also forced me to confront darker emotions that I had spent years avoiding. Guilt, shame, grief, and anger all surfaced during different moments. In this type of deep healing work we often refer to this process as shadow work. At the time I didn't use that language much, but looking back I can see that the journeys were forcing me to face parts of myself that I had pushed aside for a very long time.

During one of the later journeys a simple realization surfaced that became incredibly important. I heard myself say clearly, "I'm a good dad." The statement was not defensive or desperate. It felt grounding. In a time when so much of my identity felt shattered, that truth remained steady. I did the best I could at the time with what I had left in me.

That realization became an anchor in the middle of everything else.

The road back

In a period where much of my identity felt unstable, being a dad remained the one role that still felt undeniably true. That realization became an anchor for the rebuilding process that followed. No matter what had happened in my marriage or how uncertain the future looked, my love for my daughters had not changed. It gave me something solid to hold onto during a time when everything else felt uncertain. Fatherhood became the compass guiding my decisions moving forward.

I wrote a letter to my daughters and read it to each of them. In the letter I told them how deeply I loved them and acknowledged the ways my struggles may have affected them. Writing the letter forced me to confront the reality of what my daughters had experienced during the collapse of my marriage. They had been trying to make sense of everything through the versions of the story they had heard along the way, and those versions had shaped how they saw me. In that moment I realized that trying to fight that narrative was a battle I wasn't going to win.

I told them I would give them some space if they needed it. That decision did not come from a place of giving up on our relationship. It came from the understanding that love sometimes requires stepping back so someone else can breathe. As painful as it was, I wanted them to know they were free to process everything at their own pace. The letter represented both accountability and unconditional love.

Not long after our divorce was finalized, my daughters moved to Florida with their mother and her new husband. The move happened shortly after I had served her with court papers over parenting time issues. In a relatively short period of time, my daughters were adjusting not only to the end of our marriage, but also to a new marriage, a new home, and a move across the country. That change forced another difficult decision for me. I could quietly step back and accept the distance, or I could fight to remain present in my daughters' lives. I chose to fight, not out of anger, but out of determination. With no other real path forward, we went to court to protect my relationship with them and to make sure I remained a part of their lives.

First trip

On the first trip to Florida I had an experience I never would have imagined before. My three daughters, their new stepdad, and I spent about five hours together at a mall, just the five of us. We had lunch, walked from store to store, helped the girls pick out clothes, looked at shoes, and stood around while they tried things on. At one point I caught myself holding a stack of clothes while he went to grab another size, both of us just focused on helping them. There was a moment in there where I became aware of what was actually happening. Not in a big dramatic way, just a quiet realization. I was standing next to another guy, both of us showing up for the same three girls, and for a second I didn't know exactly where to place myself in that picture. I was their dad. That hadn't changed. But I was also watching someone else step into a role that mattered in their daily life. That feeling didn't come with a clear label. It just sat there. If someone had looked over, they probably would have wondered what the story was. But for us, we were just trying to show up for these girls in a way I never thought I would.

At some point we had the opportunity to start talking about what it means to be a dad and what it means to be a stepdad. It was simple and direct. No tension. He said he was not trying to replace me, and that hit in a way I wasn't expecting. Not defensive, not territorial, just honest. It forced me to look at something I hadn't fully put words to yet. I had a chance to tell him I appreciated that and that I was grateful he was showing up in their lives and caring for them the way he was. We both seemed to land in the same place. Every kid wants a connection with their dad. That does not go away just because life changes. I could see that he cared about them and was trying to show up the right way in the role he now has. I respected that.

I would be lying if I said this experience did not hit something in me. There was a part of me that felt the loss in a very real way. Not just the loss of the life we had, but the loss of being the one they reached for in those everyday moments that used to be mine. The routines, the small decisions, the normal life I had been part of without thinking about it. Standing there, I could feel both things at the same time. The grief of what changed, and the awareness that something good was still happening for them. But at the same time, there was a sense of peace in it. If he was going to be part of their life, I was grateful it was someone who genuinely cared about them. That does not erase anything, but it changes how I carry it.

There is no guide for what a day like that is supposed to look like. Most people would probably avoid it. But I stayed in it. I let myself be curious about what it would actually feel like instead of deciding ahead of time that it had to be uncomfortable. What mattered most was the girls. They got to see their dad and their stepdad in the same space, getting along and showing up for them. I think they saw that it was okay. They got to see something most kids never do. Two people who both care about them, standing in the same space, not competing, just showing up.

I walked away from that day different. Not because it was easy, but because I stayed present long enough to let it be what it actually was. There were moments when it would have been easier to check out emotionally or put some distance between us. That instinct was still there. I just didn't let it decide for me.

Since that first trip, there have been more. Each one has helped strengthen the bond with my daughters and allowed me to slowly become part of their lives again. I go to Florida as often as I can, renting a place as close to their house as possible. There was no big moment when everything suddenly felt repaired. It is happening slowly, one visit and one experience at a time, building trust by continuing to show up.

On this last trip, my two youngest daughters, their stepdad, and I went deep-sea fishing. He has a boat and offered to put the day together for us. It was an amazing experience. All of us together out in the ocean, catching fish, swimming in the middle of nowhere, laughing, and creating memories together. It was one of those days that would have seemed impossible to me not that long ago. Somehow, there we were. Not trying to define what we were or force it to look a certain way. Just the four of us out on the water, connected by two girls we all love, creating moments that felt like family.

The work behind the work

Moving forward

Healing hasn't come from one big moment. It comes from a lot of small ones. Times where I could have checked out and didn't. Conversations I stayed in. Days where nothing felt different, but I kept showing up anyway. For a long time, I thought the goal was to figure it all out or get back to who I used to be. That's not what happened. What changed is how I move through it.

The armor is still there. It always will be. The job, the experiences, everything that shaped me, that doesn't just go away. But I've learned it doesn't have to run everything. It doesn't have to follow me into every part of my life.

I can stay present. I can still be steady. I can still be the one people count on. But I don't have to shut everything down to do that. I can sit in the uncomfortable when it's there. I can lead with curiosity instead of trying to control everything.

I keep moving forward with an understanding I didn't have before. I don't lose my place in their lives because someone else shows up. It just asks different of me in how I show up with the weight I carry.