Episode 76: Learning to Live Again After Trauma with John Alan Sebald, Part 1

00;00;09;05 – 00;02;16;11
Kelly Parbs
Life can change in an instant, sometimes through illness, loss, or an experience so profound that it forces us to rethink who we are and what truly matters. In those moments, we are often faced with difficult questions. How do I move forward? What can I control and how do I find meaning when life no longer looks the way I expected? I’m your host, Kelly Parbs. I’m a licensed clinical social worker, and throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of working alongside people as they navigate trauma, grief, uncertainty and the often challenging process of rebuilding their lives. My guest today is John Sebald, author of the book ‘Live Again!’ John’s story is one of extraordinary resilience after surviving a life threatening medical crisis in 2021, he was forced to confront mortality, identity and the question of what it truly means to live with intention and purpose. Out of that experience, he developed 12 pillars for personal transformation – practical principles designed to help people navigate adversity and create meaningful change. Today, we’ll focus on four of those pillars. Choose your hard, build relationships, the laws of nature, and gratitude. Together, these ideas remind us that difficulty is unavoidable, that meaningful connections are essential, that our physical health profoundly affects our emotional well-being, and that gratitude can help us find perspective even in life’s hardest moments. These conversations matter because every one of us will face experiences that test our assumptions and force us to adapt. And while we may not choose what happens to us, we do have a choice in how we respond. Please welcome John. Hello, John. Thank you for joining me today.

00;02;16;19 – 00;02;18;19
John Sebald
Thank you Kelly.

00;02;18;21 – 00;02;27;11
Kelly Parbs
I appreciate you being here. And I think a great way for us to start is if you would just tell us a little bit about yourself.

00;02;27;13 – 00;02;38;23
John Sebald
I’d love to. And to start off, Kelly, thanks. I admire the work that you do. Been so forward. Looking forward to our conversation.

00;02;38;23 – 00;02;40;13
Kelly Parbs
Aww, thanks!

00;02;40;18 – 00;03;05;07
John Sebald
I’m a teacher by training. I have been an elementary school teacher or principal college admissions director, but for the better part of three decades, I’ve been focused mostly on leadership and nonprofit fundraising. And I’m a husband, and a dad, and a grandfather!

00;03;05;10 – 00;03;07;05
Kelly Parbs
Oh, all kinds of good stuff!

00;03;07;11 – 00;03;14;00
John Sebald
Yeah. This summer, my wife Kristi and I are going to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary.

00;03;14;02 – 00;03;15;13
Kelly Parbs
Congratulations.

00;03;15;13 – 00;03;45;17
John Sebald
And then the bow on top of all of that in the reason that we’re talking today. I’m. I’m a trauma survivor. I’m a trauma cardiac arrest, CPR, PTSD survivor. This past Valentine’s Day was a really special day. I celebrated my five year bonus birthday. That’s what I call it. And I published a book that I never intended to write, and I know we’ll get to that later.

00;03;45;20 – 00;04;20;15
Kelly Parbs
We will. And I saw that book, and that’s kind of the beginning of our journey of meeting each other. I sure am glad you’re here. Thank you. John. Thanks. So, soon we’re going to talk about that miracle that happened to you in in 2021, but first, in your book you talk about identity not being fixed, but something that evolves. And in order to just get to know you a little bit better, I’d like to know before 2021. How would you have described yourself?

00;04;20;18 – 00;04;50;04
John Sebald
You know, that’s a great question. First of all, I really believe that identity identity can evolve and change during seasons of life. Most recent season of my life, my wife and I now have had an empty nest for some time. I would say honestly, my identity had very much become tied in become defined by my job title. Really?

00;04;50;05 – 00;05;04;04
Kelly Parbs
Sure, sure. And then in 2021, you experienced really a miracle. And maybe you can take us back to that time and walk us through what happened.

00;05;04;06 – 00;08;07;24
John Sebald
So here’s the miracle. Turning the corner from that, that identity and and what I would take along with that, maybe the dark side of that identity for me was very much. This is going to sound silly, kind of a rainbow for younger listeners. That’s an early Sylvester Stallone movie in not the not the destructive macho side of Rambo. But Rambo was a survivalist. And and I would have to say, honestly reflecting back that I had become a survivalist, where I felt like it was all on me to figure out my path and my future. And so we’re all of that came crashing down, came in 2021. It was Valentine’s Day when I died on my kitchen floor. And I know that sounds kind of dramatic, but I choked to death. I was getting ready to grill some steak, and my daughter and her new boyfriend at the time had asked to join us on fairly short notice. I made a drink for my daughter, and that’s literally the last thing I remember. The next three hours are a complete blackout, and it turns out that during those three hours, a blackout, there were lots and lots of miracles. So what I know now is that I was grilling steak, and I evidently choked on a big piece of that steak, and that’s when my daughter’s new boyfriend jumped into immediate action. Heimlich didn’t work. I lost consciousness, went down in my kitchen floor. He began CPR on the spot. By the time paramedics arrived, I had no pulse. I was in a state we know now state. That’s called pulse loss. Electrical activity. It’s it’s a non form of cardiac arrest. That means a defibrillator would have been of no use. And I was minutes if not even moments away from being gone for good. And so the first responders were just absolutely amazing. They were able to remove this deeply lodged piece of steak and open my airway. Once that happened, my heart rebooted. I was rushed off to the local hospital emergency room, spent the following eight days at the hospital, the first four of those in in intensive care. I was breathing supplemental oxygen and hugging a pillow and coughing up lots of red sludge. But eight days later, I was released and I actually walked out of the hospital.

00;08;07;25 – 00;08;12;13
Kelly Parbs
Oh wow. I see why you call that a miracle.

00;08;12;15 – 00;08;13;22
John Sebald
Absolutely.

00;08;13;26 – 00;08;26;21
Kelly Parbs
I can’t begin to imagine how scary that must have been for your family. I mean, you don’t remember those three hours, but for them witnessing that, I can’t even imagine what they went through.

00;08;26;23 – 00;08;48;14
John Sebald
I can’t either. I’ve heard my wife do her best to relate that in my daughter and now son in law, who are all a part of this. And I’d say it was for a long time afterward that my wife had to wrestle with the possibility that she was very close to being a widow.

00;08;48;16 – 00;08;57;17
Kelly Parbs
Did you know pretty quickly that you would be okay after all of that, or was there a long period of time where where it was touch and go?

00;08;57;20 – 00;09;49;15
John Sebald
You know, it was a very surreal time. That’s just the best word I can think of. It was a very surreal time. Right. You’re going through this. Did that really happen? And I nearly died. And maybe I did die and my wife was nearly a widow. So you’ve got all of that swirling and. And I had no idea at that time, because when I came home from the hospital, I thought I was headed home for a physical recovery in that, you know, I heal up and get on with life and and looking backward. I had no idea what was to come.

00;09;49;18 – 00;10;26;17
Kelly Parbs
Well, in your book, you introduce 12 different practices that helped guide that healing for you. And like you mentioned, it wasn’t just physical healing for sure. Today I want to highlight four of them just in the interest of time. All 12 are so very interesting and maybe we can talk about more of them later. But for today I’d like to highlight four of them. But before we go into those four, tell us, John, what led you to that framework of of practices?

00;10;26;19 – 00;13;29;17
John Sebald
So thank you for for asking the to understand how the book and the framework came about. It’s important to understand the aftermath of coming home from the hospital thinking I was heading home for healing, physical healing and recovery. And not long after that, turning into literally a five alarm dumpster fire, I went deep into what I guess I now call survival mode. I was having terrible, horrific nightmares. I would wake up soaking wet, and that was a couple with vivid and bizarre and violent daydreams of my heart would race for days on end, and I was anxious and I was afraid. And and through all of this, I finally came to the point where I realized, and I waited far too long for this. I realized that I needed help. And so, about six months after the miracle, I reached out for professional help was paired with an amazing therapist. So. So that was one thing that that led to all of this. The other one happened during this long and complicated journey. About two years after that, my pastor at my church was doing a series on trauma recovery and asked me if I was willing to do an interview. He wanted an interview with a real survivor. And so the part that caught me by surprise, we did the interview live. Audience also recorded. I was absolutely floored by the response. Not that people who had been through what I had been through, but people who thought that they were struggling alone and and to find out that they weren’t alone. And so all of that happened, and I started asking myself the question, maybe I can use this crazy, complicated struggle to help other people. And now here’s the money part. I found myself wrestling with a couple of questions. Question number one what are the things if I’m going to help other people? What are the things that have helped me the most so far? But the more important question, what are the things that if I actually did that would help me the most? And over time, those two questions in a lot of writing and a lot of reflection and a lot of practicing those together became the practices.

00;13;29;20 – 00;13;40;04
Kelly Parbs
Okay. So kind of in hindsight, you looked at what has been working for me and put some structure around that. It sounds like.

00;13;40;06 – 00;13;41;05
John Sebald
Absolutely.

00;13;41;05 – 00;14;31;21
Kelly Parbs
And I love that your motivation was being able to help others, and I love that it was uncovered that other people are going through struggles to that we don’t see. And I just want to point out that the name of your book is Live again. But then under that, the road back from burnout, brokenness and the battles that no one sees. And I just think all of us can take something from that. No matter where we are in life, we are surrounded by people who are going through something that we can’t see. So that’s why I think your book is applicable just to to everyone. And I’m excited. I wish we could talk about all 12 of those practices, but again, we’ll highlight four of them, and hopefully our listeners will want to dig into that book to read about the rest.

00;14;31;23 – 00;14;33;07
John Sebald
Love it.

00;14;33;09 – 00;14;47;00
Kelly Parbs
So the first one I chose, I guess we chose together is Choose Your Heart. What does that mean? Tell us about how that is one of your practices.

00;14;47;03 – 00;16;18;16
John Sebald
Honestly, if I could if I could explain just one. Here’s probably the place I would begin. This all began with during again my my. A crazy, complicated journey and in a really dark time. It began with an epiphany because I was in such a dark place, and I came to realize that I was spending most of my time avoiding and escaping and hoping that someway, somehow, I could get better and that things would change. And it’s funny because after a particularly horrible nightmare, I had this epiphany and it went something like this. Climbing out of a hole can be really hard, and the climbing out of a whole being trapped in a hole. That’s a metaphor that I use throughout the book. When I think about that whole being in that that difficult, dark place. So doing the things necessary to get out of that hole our hard. But but if there’s the important part, staying trapped in that hole that’s hard to in feeling weak and demoralized and exhausted and anxious and afraid and self-medicating. All of those are hard. And that’s where the epiphany came from. I can choose.

00;16;18;18 – 00;16;20;27
Kelly Parbs
I think there’s some control here.

00;16;20;29 – 00;17;48;01
John Sebald
I can choose the hard and and for me, that just the empowerment of knowing that I don’t have to stay in that place, in that I can make a choice to do the small things to begin the journey out of that hole was just incredibly empowering. I heard a quote, and it didn’t make the book because I couldn’t find the source. But I just love this quote and I’ll share with you. It goes like this. What would happen if right now you’re sitting in poopy diapers and you don’t change them? So one month or one year from now, you’re still going to be sitting in poopy diapers, only worse. Maybe it’s your fault, maybe it’s not. But right now, it’s still poopy diapers and and I found no better motivator, no better way to come to grips with reality and to shake yourself into considering the cost of not making a change. And to think about the choice of whether you’re going to stay sitting where you are in the poopy diapers. And so that that choice helped me to wrap my mind around making some choices, some hard choices of my own.

00;17;48;04 – 00;17;56;28
Kelly Parbs
I have never heard that in all of my years of doing trauma counseling. I’ve never heard that. And thank you for sharing it. I’m going to use it.

00;17;57;00 – 00;17;59;02
John Sebald
I promise to send it to you.

00;17;59;03 – 00;18;24;21
Kelly Parbs
Okay. What an epiphany you had. You know, I work with grieving people a lot, and often we talk about having to feel the pain of grief as difficult as it is, because avoiding it, you know, trying to skirt it and get around it, that brings it upon, you know, different pain. And that reminds me very much of the point you’re making.

00;18;24;23 – 00;18;57;04
John Sebald
I’ve become fond of another term that I heard from somewhere else. I think it might have been Robert Downey Jr said this. He talked about hugging the cactus and and in a very real sense of being able and willing to go to that place where you hug the cactus and feel the feels and be genuinely honest about yourself and where you’re at. I found to be an important part of this process.

00;18;57;07 – 00;19;02;28
Kelly Parbs
Not an easy thing to do, but in the end brings about more healing.

00;19;03;02 – 00;20;23;18
John Sebald
And so it does. And so here’s the back side of the choose your hard it is to first of all understand that you do have the choice. And then secondly, this simple little activity which I explain in the book. But it’s something listeners could literally do today, is to what I call pay a visit to your future self. So do some time travel. After you’ve been genuinely honest, you’ve hugged the cactus, honest about where you are and why you are in the place you are. Take a visit to your future self in in. Simply take a look. Ask that person and take a look at what life would be like in very, very vivid terms if you stayed in the place that you are. If nothing changed, and if you’re still trapped in that dark place, countered by this, ask that future self. What are the things that you could do today? The simple baby steps. You could take that ten years from now. Your future self would say thank you.

00;20;23;20 – 00;20;24;22
Kelly Parbs
I love that.

00;20;24;23 – 00;20;29;11
John Sebald
And you can make it complicated, but it can really be that easy.

00;20;29;17 – 00;21;08;03
Kelly Parbs
Absolutely. And again, I think we all can take something from that. When I work with clients, I’ll often say, if you can imagine five years from now or one year from now, looking back at this situation. How would you like your story to read? How what would you like the script to be in terms of how you handled it? You have some control right now, maybe not over what happened, but how you’re choosing to manage it. And to your point, that empowers people. I do have some choice in the matter.

00;21;08;05 – 00;21;10;19
John Sebald
Absolutely. Thanks.

00;21;10;21 – 00;21;32;01
Kelly Parbs
Resilience research shows that when we face manageable discomfort intentionally, we choose to. We build long term emotional strength and adaptability. It’s kind of like building muscles, right? If we might feel saw when we do it. But because we do it, we become stronger.

00;21;32;04 – 00;21;33;20
John Sebald
Yeah, I completely agree.

00;21;33;26 – 00;22;00;02
Kelly Parbs
Yeah. So let’s talk about another one of the the practices. Your second pillar is build relationships. And this really connects to something that I believe deeply, which is that people matter. Relationships matter. So can you tell us a little bit more about how that became one of your practices?

00;22;00;05 – 00;23;36;15
John Sebald
You know, it became a practice out of, I think, partly enough, pain in being deep enough in survival. The truth is, I’m a really private person. My work has to do with having lots and lots of relationships, but at the end of the day, I’m a private person, and especially during this period, I kept a lot of secrets, even from my wife and those impacted relationships. And over time, you just become more and more of an island or a silo. And it’s funny, I came across this study. Maybe you’re familiar with it. There’s this famous study from Harvard Medical School involved, I think more than 300,000 individuals in. The upshot is that a lack of strong relationships and increased premature death by as much as 50%, right? It just crazy crazy, which they said is comparable to smoking almost a pack of cigarettes a day. Wow. So you think about if if the lack of strong relationships and have that kind of a detrimental impact, well, then the opposite must be true. To write that good relationships and healthy relationships and have an incredibly healing impact. And I very much needed and wanted that.

00;23;36;17 – 00;23;53;19
Kelly Parbs
Absolutely. Actually, John, the number one indicator of people’s level of resilience is their support system, their ability to know and connect with their support system. So that’s right in line with that.

00;23;53;22 – 00;25;07;25
John Sebald
Yeah. And so for me, that support system, it was there. In fact it was larger than I even realized. But what I found out is that I had to begin by trusting. I had to be willing to trust and crack open the door, beginning with a few people that I believed would listen and not judge, but listen and care because I didn’t even know in my own head if I was crazy or not. And there was a boy. There was a long window of time. I couldn’t even talk about this without becoming completely unglued. But with time and with patience and cracking open that door, I found just the most incredible healing. When you take these things that have been going on that even you don’t understand, and you share them with somebody who genuinely cares about you. It’s just like taking 1,000 pound weight off your shoulders.

00;25;07;26 – 00;25;27;24
Kelly Parbs
Such a relief. John, are you willing to share with us like some of the symptoms or maybe negative coping strategies you were using during this time that were hard to talk about? Just so maybe our listeners can relate. Maybe they’re going through something similar.

00;25;27;27 – 00;26;46;18
John Sebald
Well, yeah, I am happy to, because I’ve committed myself for the sake of helping other people. I am an open book. There are so many ways to escape because when you’re going through difficult struggles in a lot of pain, right? You’ll do anything to try to flip the switch and escape from that, even if it’s for a few minutes. And so on the one hand, it might be social media and just spending too much time in mindless, brainless places that at the time feel like an escape. Well, it turns out long term that it’s really having some negative effects for me. Probably a big one that I’m guessing people in your audience can relate to is I made new friends. I in fact, I became, I call it besties. With Jim, Jack and Johnny. I became friends with pretty much anything that was at least 80 proof because, again, even for a short term escape, that self-medicating makes you feel like you’re just a little bit better.

00;26;46;20 – 00;26;46;28
Kelly Parbs
Sure.

00;26;46;29 – 00;27;02;06
John Sebald
It’s just it’s an escape, and it helps numb things just a little bit. And what seems like is helping in the short term can become a real long term problem. So those are a couple of them.

00;27;02;08 – 00;28;18;08
Kelly Parbs
Thank you. Thanks for just being vulnerable and sharing those because you’re absolutely right. Those are negative coping strategies that very many people participate in. And I love that you’re living proof that you can get through that to a healthier place, which is what we’re talking about. And and the practice we’re talking about is the importance of building relationships. And I just want to put out there that one of the most consistent findings in psychology is that relationships are one of the strongest predictors of mental health and happiness, and even longevity, more even than success or wealth. So I think choosing that as one of your practices is is right on the money. Thanks. And I think a takeaway from listeners here is to think about the importance of building your support system right now and nurturing relationships before you have a personal crisis in your life, so that if that does happen, you already have that in place. Don, do you feel like you show up differently for people now having gone through this, like being on the other side of being someone’s support system?

00;28;18;10 – 00;28;50;08
John Sebald
I it’s funny. I’m a different person. I’m very much a different person than I was before the miracle. I’ve got a couple of close friends who have given me the nickname John 2.0. So so I believe, I genuinely, humbly believe I show up differently as a healthier and a more resilient in a more caring and empathetic person than I was before. Absolutely.

00;28;50;10 – 00;29;10;26
Kelly Parbs
The really, really good and beautiful things can come out of a tragedy, and you’re living proof of that. So let’s move on to the next practice. Your third practice is obey the laws of nature, and that really has a focus on health and fitness. So tell us a little bit about that.

00;29;10;29 – 00;31;21;11
John Sebald
I love this section. It’s the longest section of the book. I actually broke it into two chapters and I teach I talk about ten laws of Nature, and I do that partly because this is such a misunderstood topic, and there’s confusion and there’s conflicting advice everywhere. But I also found this can have such a profound impact when it comes to your mental health, which I think is sometimes ignored. So all of this here’s a little story of metaphor that I use for the laws of nature. Back when I was a young, single teacher, I used to like to cook and I like to eat, but there was something I didn’t like to do and that was to rinse the dishes. So eventually there’s this big stack, this big pile of dishes in the kitchen sink. And, Kelly, do you know what happens to the leftover remnants of the lasagna and the mac and cheese and all the good stuff when it sits on those dishes for weeks and weeks on end? The answer is simple. It turns the concrete, right? It absolutely turns to concrete, and you finally realize you need a jackhammer to get that stuff off your plates. Which you think about it, you could have taken all of 20 30s and rinsed, but now you’ve got a problem because it’s concrete. So I like that fun little anecdote because it’s a law of nature. It happens. It happens whether you believe it or not. It happens whether you like it or not. It’s a law of nature, just like gravity. And so what I talk about in the laws of nature are these principles, these, these beautiful, natural things that happen if you empower them to happen for the sake of your mental health.

00;31;21;14 – 00;31;35;07
Kelly Parbs
Again, that element of you have some control here. You can choose to let the dishes pile up for a month at a time, or you can choose to rinse the plates. You know each evening it’s up to you. Choose your heart.

00;31;35;09 – 00;33;14;12
John Sebald
You’ve got so much control on a daily level in terms of the simple things, and they really are. They feel difficult. There are simple things that on a daily basis, it can help you make you be healthier maybe than you’ve ever been before. And I found here’s another metaphor that I love to use, and I think about this. Your body has this incredible built in pharmacy. When we think about pharmacies, we think about all these things on shelves that we need to put into our body. It turns out your body’s got its own pharmacy and it can work absolute miracles if you give it the right things to to work its magic. And it can. Honestly, it can help you to feel better, and it can control your emotions, and it can help you to think more clearly and it can help you to heal. And there are three things that I found. If I were to just boil it down, to do these three things. It comes down to sleep and it comes down to what you eat, and it comes down to moving it really those three things, when you get enough sleep and when you hydrate and you eat the right things and when you move your body. You can empower that built in pharmacy to work absolute miracles.

00;33;14;14 – 00;33;44;22
Kelly Parbs
Absolutely. And we know now that the brain and the body are so deeply connected, right. Sleep, movement, nutrition, hydration directly improve our mood and how we handle stress and how we regulate our emotions. They’re all connected. Can you tell us a little bit about what your journey was in terms of improving in all of those areas, and how it changed your life?

00;33;44;24 – 00;37;27;24
John Sebald
So I like anything else. It was experimenting. It was learning. It was listening to other people I trust and other sources I trust because there’s so much noise in this area. And then just finding what are those things that that make a difference in the work for you. And then I consistently found those those three things and I break them down this way. I take these I guess I call it five steps. Choose your heart. We’ve already covered, but you have to choose your heart to begin with, because some of this is going to be uncharted territory and it’s going to be uncomfortable. So start with sleep. Sleep is an absolute wonder drug. It just truly is. And you can get more done with more sleep. So question number one is getting are you getting enough sleep. Start with 7 to 8 hours. Some people even need more than that. It’s a law of nature. It’s the way you’re wired and it can give you incredible health benefits. The second or the next one would be to just be mindful of what you eat. Talk about an area where there’s so much noise and so much misinformation. Here’s where I began is to focus on how different foods make you feel, not not just in the moment when you’re eating them, but 30 minutes later, or an hour later, or a half a day later. Do you feel energy? Do you feel like you want to move, or do you feel like you were just hit by a train and that you need to take a nap? And so over time, I found the things that work for me. Honestly, I’m incredibly boring now. I’m usually a protein and vegetable guy because those things make me feel good. Help me to think clearly. They have an impact on my mood and my attitude, and it’s not as if I don’t love all the other things. I have them once in a while for a treat, but I I’ve got to make a trade off between feeling good, feeling tired and foggy. So. So that’s where I like beginning with food and then moving. If you want to do something simple, start with walking 30 minutes a day. Figure it out. How can you move your body and walk 30 minutes a day? And then beyond that, what’s the way that you can start doing some modest lifting of heavy things a couple times a week? All of those things just feed that pharmacy and give your body all the right things so that you feel better and so that you heal. Last one, and this is the money step. It’s it’s really simple. It’s do something because this is an area that it’s just so easy to overthink. And so you overthink. And then you just sit on your couch with a bag of chips and doing nothing will result in nothing. Right? And so stop doing nothing. Do something. And I just promise and guarantee it will have an impact on all of the other parts of your life.

00;37;28;01 – 00;38;15;21
Kelly Parbs
I love the simplicity of that because it can be overwhelming when we read self-help books or look at things on social media, how many complicated things we can do to make our life better. And what you’re saying is improve your sleep, watch what you eat, move your body, and basically don’t just be staying and do something, anything. And and those are pretty simple. I think most of us can can say we could make those changes, even if it’s just one at a time. And to your point, I think even if you make one of those changes, it will probably change other areas of your life as well. So each one quietly strengthens all of the other practices.

00;38;15;26 – 00;38;18;19
John Sebald
Yes and amen!

00;38;18;21 – 00;38;52;20
Kelly Parbs
-laughs- Stay tuned for part two of my conversation with John Sebald as we continue exploring practical ways to respond to adversity, strengthen our relationships, care for our physical and emotional health, and find gratitude even during difficult times. To hear this episode and other episodes of OnTopic with Empathia, visit our website at www.Empathia.com. Follow us on social media @Empathia,m and subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. I’m Kelly Parbs- Thanks for listening!