Your Thursday Three Things for July 9th, 2026
When we connect, we survive!
Note… today’s edition is heavy and covers suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, please call the national suicided hotline at 988. Veterans and service members, press 1.
Dr. Shauna “Doc” Springer came back on the show with a book that says the kind, compassionate playbook we built to save our bravest is broken, and in some cases it’s costing lives. Here’s what she’d put in its place.
Doc Springer has read the suicide notes. Enough of them, over enough years, that she started catching a pattern in the words.
Some of those notes echoed the exact language we put on the posters. The awareness-campaign language. The “during the time I gave this talk, this many people died by suicide” language. One of them said, in effect, “Well, I guess I became part of that statistic.”
She has been to more funerals than most of us ever will, sitting with the families and the teammates of people who took their own lives. And her conclusion is going to make a lot of well-meaning people uncomfortable. The compassionate-sounding playbook we built to save our warriors and first responders is, in some cases, helping bury them.
That’s the swing she takes in her new book, Fallout: 10 Common Beliefs That Kill Our Bravest and the Truths That Can Save Them. Will and I had her back on to make the case.
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Awareness was never the finish line
For 20 years the strategy has been awareness. Show people the numbers. Make them care. And Doc’s point is that the warriors and first responders already know the numbers, in caskets, not statistics. Piling on more alarming data doesn’t wake them up. It makes the whole thing feel like a runaway train nobody can stop, and helplessness is intolerable for someone with a warrior spirit. So the messaging meant to save them quietly tells them they’re next.
Awareness is the start. Action is the point. She actually named our Awareness to Action course on the show as being on the same page, and I’ll take it, because that gap is the exact reason Will and I built it. Knowing you’re stressed has never once lowered my heart rate. Having something to do about it has.
She’d also retire a word most of us lean on: resilience. Resilience means bounce back from adversity, and everybody is resilient right up until they’re not. Uphold it as the goal and the person who hits the wall, and it’s when, not if, starts white-knuckling a private war while still showing up to work looking squared away. Her word instead is elasticity. Range of motion in your nervous system, your identity, and your relationships. Can you ramp all the way up for the call, and then bring yourself all the way back down to sit on the floor with your kid. She’s run her elasticity check with more than 5,500 first responders, and about a quarter of them land in the red zone.
I teach resilience. I sat there on the episode half-joking that I need to go torch my own material. I still haven’t fully squared it. Maybe I’m not supposed to yet.
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Shame doesn’t save anyone
Here’s the belief that hit closest to home for our community. We’re told to tell people suicide is selfish. How could you do that to your wife, your kids, your brothers.
Doc calls suicide an insurgency of the mind, an altered state of consciousness, the way an anorexic person medically starving looks in the mirror and sees fat. Shame doesn’t reach a mind in that state. It confirms what the mind is already whispering: I’m the problem, I’m the threat, I should take myself out.
And a lot of warriors don’t experience it as selfish at all. They experience it as selfless. I’m the danger to the people I love, so removing me is a gift. That is a lie, one of the cruelest the mind can tell. What your people actually want is you, healed, back at the table. When we stand up at a memorial and refuse to honor someone because of how they died, the people in that room quietly doing the same math hear it loud and clear.
The antidote she keeps coming back to is connection. “Get thee to a doctor” makes a person feel cut off, sick, sent away to be fixed. A doc who gets it is an extension of the tribe. What actually pulls people off the ledge, over and over, is “authentic connection with someone that gives a shit.” Her words. I’m leaving them exactly as she said them.
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Treat the injury first
The line that’ll ruffle the most feathers: Doc, a psychologist, says talk therapy shouldn’t be the first move for most people in this community.
Her logic is a broken knee. You get the surgery, then you rehab. If your nervous system is locked in the on position, hair-trigger, no sleep, a movie of the worst day playing across your eyes, you are not actually in the room for therapy. So treat the injury first. She points to the dual sympathetic reset, a two-sided stellate ganglion block, two small anesthetic injections in the neck that reboot the fight-or-flight system. Not psychoactive. Novocaine’s cousin, aimed at your nervous system.
I’ve had it. Both sides, a couple days apart. You walk out with a droopy eye for a bit, looking a little creepy, and it works. What I’d never considered until this conversation is the sequence. Reset the system, then do the work. Doc was generous about the mindfulness and meditation I teach, and also clear: that’s how you maintain a regulated nervous system, not how you reset one that’s stuck. Fair. I needed to hear it.
If you’re in crisis, or someone you love is, you can call or text 988 anytime. Veterans and service members, press 1.
What to do about it
Ask twice. When you check on someone and they say “I’m good,” ask again. The first answer is almost always armor. The second one is sometimes the truth.
Move from awareness to action. Knowing you’re running hot changes nothing. Pick one concrete practice this week and actually run it. Start with our free Awareness Self-Assessment so you know where you stand.
Trade “be more resilient” for range of motion. Stop grading yourself on how hard you can push. Ask whether you can also come back down, sleep, and be present at home after.
Treat the injury, not just the story. If your system is stuck on, ask a professional about nervous-system resets like the DSR through Stella Mental Health, before or alongside talk therapy.
Be someone’s tribe. Don’t outsource the whole thing to “go see a doctor.” Be the peer who stays connected through it. When we connect, we survive.
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This week on Men Talking Mindfulness
Dr. Shauna “Doc” Springer has spent more than a decade embedded with warfighters and first responders. She came up through the VA, spent 3 years at TAPS, the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, learning grief and loss from the families left behind, and she’s the author of Warrior and the new Fallout. She works with Stella Mental Health, runs Thin Line Advisory, and is a senior advisor to the Veteran Mentor Project. Reach her at doc@thinlineadvisory.com.
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This week’s edition is too important to keep the resources below behind a fire-wall… so we will continue here for everyone.
Three resources for walking someone through mental warfare
Resource 1: Trade resilience for elasticity
Resilience asks one question: can you bounce back. Elasticity asks a fuller one: can you move through the whole range and still come home. It covers your nervous system, your identity, and your relationships, and it drops the moral sting of “you should be tougher.”
Prompt: where’s your range of motion right now? Rate each of these 1 to 5, honestly.
When my phone rings, my first thought is “something bad happened.”
I can get calm enough after a hard day to actually be present with the people I love.
I can shift between roles (leader, partner, parent, friend) without dragging the last one into the next.
I recover from a bad night’s sleep instead of stacking them.
I can feel a hard emotion without either shoving it down or letting it run the day.
Low scores aren’t a verdict. They’re a starting line. Pick the one that stung most and give it 2 weeks of small attention.
Further reading: Fallout, Dr. Shauna Springer (the whole argument in her words). Elastic Identity, the short book she contributed a chapter to (flexibility as a skill). Tribe, Sebastian Junger (why belonging is the variable we keep missing).
Resource 2: Spot the person who’s “still operational”
The dangerous ones aren’t falling apart in the open. They’re reporting for duty, performing at a high level, and privately coming apart. Learn the tells.
Prompt: run this on your people, and on yourself.
Have they gone quiet in the group chat or the locker room lately?
Is the drinking or the “one more thing at work” creeping up?
Are they giving one-word answers to real questions?
Have they started giving things away, wrapping things up, talking in past tense about themselves?
When did someone last see them off the clock?
If a few of these land, you don’t need a diagnosis. You need a coffee, a drive, a “talk to me, I’ve got time.” Reach out clumsy over not at all.
Further reading: Warrior, Dr. Shauna Springer (who warriors actually open up to, and why). The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk (trauma lives in the body, not just the story). On Combat, Dave Grossman (what sustained stress does to the operator).
Resource 3: Be the tribe
Tools and medicine matter. Connection is what turns people around, again and again. And grief is its own animal. Healthy grief was never about saying goodbye and filing the person away, so don’t try to help someone “process out” a loss the way you’d process trauma.
Prompt: this week, close one gap.
Name one person who’s been on your mind and hasn’t heard from you.
Reach out with something specific, not “let me know if you need anything.”
If they’re grieving, ask about the person they lost. Say the name. Let it be present instead of tidied away.
Tell one person your own real answer to “how are you,” so the road runs both ways.
Further reading: What It’s Like to Go to War, Karl Marlantes (the moral weight of coming home). It’s OK That You’re Not OK, Megan Devine (grief isn’t a problem to solve). Together, Vivek Murthy (loneliness as a health crisis, and connection as the fix).
One more thing
For the warriors and first responders reading this, reach Doc at doc@thinlineadvisory.com and grab Fallout.
Until next time,
Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider
Focus Now Training and Men Talking Mindfulness
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