Ep. 18 - When You Lose Someone and Nobody Has the Right Words

Ep. 18 - When You Lose Someone and Nobody Has the Right Words

Bryan Martin lost his partner Clayton in 2018 after a bizarre accident during yard work which led to a fungal infection, a missed diagnosis, and liver failure within months. He also lost his father that same year. What followed was grief compounded by invisibility — a doctor in the ER dismissed him because he and Clayton weren't married, and people around him minimized the loss for the same reason. Bryan talks about what it actually felt like to move through those years, including the fog of early grief, the anger of year two, and the isolation of the pandemic that eventually pushed him toward dancing in his kitchen on TikTok. That dancing became something neither of us expected. Bryan now has 1.2 million Facebook followers who show up every morning for his kitchen dance videos with a cup of coffee. He talks about how that started not as content but as survival — a way to give himself something to look forward to when the world shut down and there was nothing else. What grew out of it, including parents messaging him to say they finally understood their gay children better, is something he still doesn't fully have words for. We talk about the strange timeline of grief — how four years or eight years can feel both endless and impossibly fast, how certain moments cut through the fog without warning, and why the people who haven't been through it often say the most inadvertently hurtful things. Bryan also wrote a book, The Widow Dancer, compiled from five years of blog posts he wrote for a widowed support organization. He talks about going back and reading all of it, and crying straight through. There's also a conversation here about what it means to be widowed without being married, and why that distinction shouldn't matter but still does — in hospitals, in social circles, in how people respond to your grief. Bryan is remarried now, to Devin, who by the way is very cute. But the throughline of this whole conversation is the same one that started it: you lose your person, and that's what it is. Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP * Email: jill@jillbershad.com  [https://jill@jillbershad.com/] * Website: jillbershad.com [https://www.jillbershad.com/] * Instagram: @jillkbershad.lmhc [https://www.instagram.com/jillkbershad.lmhc/] * Facebook: jillkbershad [https://www.facebook.com/jillkbershad]

Ep. 17 - Finding Purpose After Losing a Child with Camilla Goodwin of Myla's Beleaf

Childhood cancer, grief, and what it actually looks like to build something meaningful after the worst possible loss. Camilla Goodwin lost her daughter Myla in 2020 to a rare and aggressive form of kidney cancer called Wilms tumor. She was eight years old. In the years since, Camilla and her husband Mike have opened a restaurant, started a foundation, raised over three million dollars for families facing childhood cancer diagnoses, and somehow kept showing up for their other two kids, their community, and each other. This conversation goes to a lot of honest places. Camilla talks about the adrenaline that carried her through the early months, nursing school, a psychology degree, a master's in education, all of it driven by that same force that Jill recognizes from her own experience of loss. They talk about the moment she realized she was reliving her trauma every time she sat with grieving parents, and how she had to step back from that part of the work to stay healthy enough to keep doing any of it. There is a lot in here about faith, or the loss of it, and what slowly comes back. About the ways Myla shows up for her family still, through leaves in unexpected places, through the way her kids talk about her every single day. About what it meant to keep Myla's diagnosis framed in hope rather than statistics, and how that shaped the final years of her life. Myla's Beleaf provides financial support to families navigating childhood cancer, from active treatment through end of life. They have helped 360 families in four years. The foundation is based in South Florida and operates across the state. Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP * Email: jill@jillbershad.com  [https://jill@jillbershad.com/] * Website: jillbershad.com [https://www.jillbershad.com/] * Instagram: @jillkbershad.lmhc [https://www.instagram.com/jillkbershad.lmhc/] * Facebook: jillkbershad [https://www.facebook.com/jillkbershad]

Ep. 16 - When Your Pain Finally Outgrows Your Fear

First responder mental health and the silence around it is where this conversation begins — with Tim Roberto, a Marine Corps veteran with 19 years of sobriety who turned his own history into something that helps people in uniform ask for help without losing anything in the process. He founded Stomping Out the Stigma, a nonprofit that connects first responders and veterans with licensed, culturally competent therapists. No insurance. No HR. No agency reporting. First name only, and someone calls you back within 24 hours. Tim started using at 11, worked his way through everything available between then and 16, and got sober at 44. What finally moved him wasn't a program or a person — it was a quiet realization that his pain had grown bigger than his fear. For years, fear-based decisions had only produced more fear, the same drain cycling through the same dark. Recovery came through 12-step literature, morning routines, and what he calls a complete psychic change — not something he can fully explain, just something he stopped trying to figure out and started living instead. He grew up one of five boys, raised by an authoritarian Italian father who had been sent back to Italy alone at eight years old for his education, and a deeply codependent English mother. Tim spent most of his childhood trying to be anything other than himself. The episode moves through his early years, his time in the Marine Corps, the moment in a Burger King parking lot at 16 when cocaine found him and he knew immediately it was different, and the first sober Christmas when he finally told his father he loved him — a scene that takes a long time to get through and is worth every second. Jill brings her own thread in — her father, her husband's death, the boundary she set in her early 50s that she couldn't have set before, and what it finally felt like to be parented after spending most of her life without it. Both of them return again and again to the same ground: showing up for yourself in the morning before the day takes over, watching patterns instead of words, staying off the victim triangle, and choosing response over reaction. None of it is abstract. All of it is earned. Palm Beach County has one of the highest death by suicide rates among first responders in any county in Florida. Nationally, more first responders die by suicide than in the line of duty. If you or someone you know is in uniform and struggling, Tim can be reached at sotsinc24@gmail.com or sotsinc.org. Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP * Email: jill@jillbershad.com  [https://jill@jillbershad.com/] * Website: jillbershad.com [https://www.jillbershad.com/] * Instagram: @jillkbershad.lmhc [https://www.instagram.com/jillkbershad.lmhc/] * Facebook: jillkbershad [https://www.facebook.com/jillkbershad]

Ep. 15 - When Life Keeps Saying No and You Keep Going Anyway

Adventure therapy, Navy SEALs, and what happens when the path you were certain about closes on you twice. David Cohen, a therapist and founder of Invictus Psychotherapy in Boca Raton, sits down to talk about how a DWI at 19 changed the entire direction of his life, and what it took to find purpose on the other side of that. David walks through what adventure therapy actually looks like in practice, why talking about your problems in a chair only goes so far, and how taking someone rock climbing or kayaking can get to places that traditional talk therapy never reaches. The conversation moves into the body, the nervous system, and why so many people are walking around in a stress response they do not even recognize as one. Jill and David talk honestly about sitting with emotions instead of outrunning them, the difference between insight and actual change, and why the belief "I can't do it" that shows up on a ropes course is the exact same belief that shows up everywhere else in a person's life. There is also a real conversation about men and emotional expression, and what it takes to access feelings when you were conditioned not to have them. There is a lot of ground covered here, including OCD, hypnotherapy, exposure therapy, and what it means to be of genuine service versus just getting by. David is about to join the Army National Guard, has a two-month-old at home, and sees around thirty clients a week. He is doing the work, and it shows. Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP * Email: jill@jillbershad.com  [https://jill@jillbershad.com/] * Website: jillbershad.com [https://www.jillbershad.com/] * Instagram: @jillkbershad.lmhc [https://www.instagram.com/jillkbershad.lmhc/] * Facebook: jillkbershad [https://www.facebook.com/jillkbershad]

Ep. 14 - Surviving a Stroke and Losing a Spouse Finding the Will to Keep Showing Up

Friendship that holds through the worst moments is hard to put into words, but this conversation tries. Jill sits down with Andrew Reiss, a retired pediatrician and long-time family friend, to talk about what it actually looks like to rebuild a life after something shatters it. For Andrew, that was a massive stroke in November 2019 that left his left side paralyzed, though he had no awareness of it in the moment. For Jill, it was losing her husband Adam. Both of them have been figuring out, in real time, how to keep going. Andrew talks honestly about the early days of recovery, going from full speed to complete stillness, and how he developed what he calls minimum daily fitness, a small, non-negotiable commitment to his body that had as much to do with quieting his inner critic as it did with getting stronger. He also reflects on a recent climb up Pico Duarte, the tallest mountain in the Caribbean, and what came into focus afterward about identity, letting go of the role he had held for decades, and what he is building now in its place. The conversation moves into what Andrew watched work with his patients and his own kids over the years, specifically around emotional validation and resilience. His point is simple but easy to skip over: you have to validate the feeling before you try to change the behavior. And the modeling of resilience, he says, starts with parents actually taking care of themselves, not just their children. There is also a quieter thread running through all of it, about connection, vulnerability, and what happens when people stop waiting to feel better before they take the next step. Andrew describes it as acting your way into better feeling, and Jill recognizes it immediately from her own work with clients walking through grief and depression. This one covers a lot of ground, stroke recovery, grief, parenting, identity after retirement, service work abroad, and two people who have stayed close through all of it. Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP * Email: jill@jillbershad.com  [https://jill@jillbershad.com/] * Website: jillbershad.com [https://www.jillbershad.com/] * Instagram: @jillkbershad.lmhc [https://www.instagram.com/jillkbershad.lmhc/] * Facebook: jillkbershad [https://www.facebook.com/jillkbershad]