Surviving the Tsunami: A Story of Trauma, Resilience & Hope | Inspired Men Talk Podcast ft. James Newell
So hello, and welcome to Inspired Men Talk, the podcast where we explore honest conversations around men's mental health from overcoming personal struggles and helping others through theirs. My name is Peter, and I'm a solution focused hypnotherapist. I help people with their fears and phobias and overcoming workplace stress. And with me, as always, is Gary. Good morning, Gary.
Gary Johannes:Good morning, and thank you very much for introducing, yes, another brilliant podcast. I'm Gary, and I'm also a solution focused hypnotherapist and solution focused practitioner and also a lecturer to train other therapists in the solution focused model. And everything we do is about mental health.
Peter Ely:Fantastic. Thank you very much, Gary. And fresh back from Japan, we have Ben Baker Pollard. Hello, Ben.
Benn Baker-Pollard:Hello, everybody. Yeah. Ben Baker Pollard. Again, solution focused therapist. Slightly jet lagged from Japan.
Benn Baker-Pollard:I'm not gonna lie. It was a little bit weary this morning as anything landed last night. But, yeah, policeman as well, and bring a different perspective, but also lecture. And I'm a newly qualified supervisor as a You are.
Gary Johannes:So so so before we go on to introduce, I just need to ask an interesting question here. Because last year, you went to The States. We've been this year. I can't remember. But is the jet lag west, I mean, east to west or west to east?
James Newell:Do you
Benn Baker-Pollard:know what? I'm actually finding it far easier this time around because we actually go back in time.
Gary Johannes:Right.
Benn Baker-Pollard:So in Japan, you're a day ahead.
James Newell:Yeah.
Benn Baker-Pollard:So, actually, coming back yesterday, it's like just getting up early and doing a really long day, like, 4AM in the morning and just sort of, you know, 09:10 o'clock at night. So I say, touch wood, so far, it doesn't feel half as bad.
Gary Johannes:Good. Good. Good. Pete, I'm back. I'm back over to you.
Gary Johannes:I just need to ask that. I was like, oh, wonder.
Peter Ely:Thank you very much, Gary. And thank you, Ben. So every episode, we sit down with real people, and we wanna have powerful stories and and learn about the lives and the lived experience that can inspire us and hopefully you as our listeners. And today, we have another amazing guest, gentleman by the name of James Newell. Good morning, James.
James Newell:Good morning. You don't have amazing just yet. Let me speak first. Thanks for having me. You could decide in a minute.
Peter Ely:I'm sure I'm sure we always have amazing guests. They're always amazing. So yeah. No. So thank you for for joining us, James.
James Newell:My pleasure.
Peter Ely:And, James, you have an incredible lived experience. Something amazing happened to you, and and you came through that. Mhmm. And I'm not gonna spoil the story. I'm gonna hand over to you and say, tell us a little bit, a, about you and and what happened to you and why you're here with us today.
James Newell:Yeah. Well, I think actually, because I was referred to you by a good friend of ours. There's there's another thing that I don't think you actually know about happened before the thing that you know about. So this would be interesting. Oh.
James Newell:So my name is James Neil. I'm currently 41 years old. Father of three. And it's funny because I usually define myself by what I do in the business world. But from a mental health point of view, it's really great to be here and talking with you guys because I have had essentially a lifetime of exposure to mental health issues, mostly bad, unfortunately.
James Newell:And it started when I was nine well, it started throughout my childhood really. But when I was 19, I lost my father to suicide, which was obviously a hugely life defining moment. And I realized obviously at the time, I didn't really understand what happened. I was, I was very young, but proceeding that we lived in a household where we were under threat of violence on a daily basis. And sadly, when the news actually came, when I was at work at the time, when my brother came to visit me at work and say that it had happened, we hadn't seen my dad in about five years.
James Newell:And it was actually good news, as sad as that is to say. Because for the first time in a long time, I actually felt safe. Because we lived in fear for the longest time that he was gonna find us. We had sworn affidavits on our dress, and we kind of went into hiding essentially. So that was a hugely, hugely defining moment.
James Newell:And I've had over five hundred hours of professional counseling and CBT therapy and all sorts of stuff to deal with that in particular. But then the story gets interesting. So by the time I'm 21, I get my inheritance and I was extremely angry and it's only really been when I'm 41 now about to turn 42. It's only the last two or three years. I've lost the anger towards what happened.
James Newell:It's taken me that long to do it. But at the time I was really angry and I wanted to waste the money as quickly as possible, essentially like a two fingers up at you kind of thing. So I thought I'm gonna go traveling around the world. So I planned this trip, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Borneo, Bali, Australia, America, not Japan, unfortunately. Mhmm.
James Newell:But I hope I wanted to go and have a really great time, waste some money as quickly as possible. And for me, I had this notion of resetting the Etch A Sketch of my life. So to that point, it was a bit of a mess. Hadn't been great. I was working in the motor trade at the time, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do.
James Newell:So I thought, well, I've got the time and the freedom. I'm going to just travel the world and go and do that thing. So October I left and I left it by myself and it was because obviously none of my friends had tens of thousands of pounds to spend on traveling. It was just me cause I'd had the inheritance. So I made the decision to go by myself.
James Newell:The first stop was Bangkok, Thailand. And I remember getting on the plane and sitting next to this old couple and thinking, oh, no, this is, this is disappointing. It's like, I'm sure they're lovely people, but I haven't really got anything in common with them. And it turns out they were sat in the wrong seats. So then they moved away and this single guy moved in who was also traveling doing exactly the same thing I was.
James Newell:So from the very moment I got on the plane, there was kind of serendipitous notion of like, Oh, this is interesting. I'm in, I'm in the right place. So I flew to Bangkok, Thailand. And I still remember the first email I sent home, which was greetings from another world. It was just such a wild experience.
James Newell:Probably like you going to Japan, you know, it's just such a different world to to what we used to over here. I had a good few weeks of traveling by myself, meeting people, you kind of pair up with people for a bit, and then you go back to yourself, etcetera, etcetera. That was October. And we got towards Christmas time. And I was in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and I met a guy called Mark.
James Newell:And he said, hey, Christmas is coming up. Do you want to buddy up with me for Christmas? We'll go. There's this amazing place in Thailand called PP Island. We'll go there for Christmas.
James Newell:We'll be there for like the month of December essentially. And then we'll see what happens from there. I was like, sounds good to me. So we worked our way back up through, through the islands and through Asia, back to Thailand and to PP Island. And we actually got there about a week or so before Christmas actually hit.
James Newell:Cause we did a few cool things along the way. And we got to PP Island and I don't know if you guys have ever have any experience of PPI Island and what it's actually like. So it, it was, I suppose it is again now, but it was one of the most like picturesque places on earth. There's a place they called James Bond Island. So they filmed one of the James Bond films there.
James Newell:It's like completely clear water, white sand. It's what you when you think of paradise, you will think of this place basically, and it really exists. So we got there. We paid for our bungalow in advance and life was good. I stopped wearing my watch.
James Newell:I stopped wearing my shoes. I started to really relax and kind of, I haven't got a haircut to be a hippie, but I started to Alright. I started to embrace this kind of very relaxed lifestyle. And it's, ah, this is awesome. Bearing in mind where I'd come from.
James Newell:I felt like I was really achieving what I wanted to hear, which was just, ah, I'm gonna just try and get over everything that's happened and this will all be fine. So we got to Christmas day night. So when Christmas day, we had a nice dinner. It's I think it's like a Swedish restaurant. We had like a roast dinner, Christmas dinner.
James Newell:Got to Christmas day night. We're in a place called hippies bar on PP Island. And I was drinking with some people there. I met another guy called James. So he was slightly older than me, far better looking and far more successful.
James Newell:So I really liked him, but I hated him at the same time. And it was not unusual for us because this bar was literally on the beach. Like the water was like meters away from us. It was not unusual for us just to stay there and drink till the sun came up. So that was the plan.
James Newell:We're like, great. We're going to stay and drink till the sun comes up. I say, yeah, sounds good to me. Why should today be any different? It's been Christmas.
James Newell:Lovely jubbly. I went out to the toilet, which kind of little shack, so you have to walk a little bit out the way to this kind of shack toilet. And on that journey, I sobered up really quickly and I thought, I'm exhausted. And I've been drinking for quite a while now, not just today, but like for the past few days, I'm not going to stay with them. But what I'm going to do is I'm just going to do an Irish goodbye.
James Newell:So I'm just going to leave basically because I know that if I go back and say, well, probably should be hitting the hay, they're going to talk me into staying. And I don't, I don't want to do that. So I walked from the toilets back out, kind of hiding from the bar. So you didn't see me straight back down towards our bungalow. And then I fell asleep fully clothed on my bed and that was it.
James Newell:Everything was good. I had money. I was 21 life was good. Next day I wake up to hear screaming like I've never ever heard screaming before. And it was a real rude awakening.
James Newell:I was like, oh, something's going on. I thought those people kind of messing about and playing football or something outside our bungalow. So Mark, the guy that I was with, he'd made it back from the place and had a go. It's funny, there, there weren't two legs coming out the bed. There were four.
James Newell:So it's him. He brought a girl back. So I kind of make sure it's his fur shook his fur. Mate, something's going on. I really don't know.
James Newell:I opened the door and there's kind of water on the floor, a little bit of flooding, and then everything goes black. Absolutely everything goes black. So we got engulfed by a tsunami wave at that point. So I went from being in a completely dry normal room, like we're sat in now, to being completely submerged, just instantaneous. Even now it's hard to fathom just that switch.
James Newell:And I was drunk out of my mind to boot, which was exciting. And, and a really interesting thing happened because I'm the world's biggest worrier and I prepare for things and I check things and I'm early and all the details, etcetera. But when the actual event came, and I was in fear of my life, I was as lucid and cool as it comes. So I went from being in the room to being in water. Instantly, I knew I was in water, and I knew that I had to find air.
James Newell:So this building room is kind of like a small shack bungalow on little stilts. And to paint the scene for you, if you Google Pee Pee Island, you'll see it shaped like the letter h. So the central part is called an isthmus. So an isthmus is not like a peninsula. So a peninsula's got water on all three sides, and isthmus has it on two sides, and the sea was essentially level with the land.
James Newell:So what had happened was the sea receded on this side, and it receded on this side, and then it came through on both sides and submerged the central section of the island for a good, good few minutes. The island that I was on had the hot I think it was the highest number of Western fatalities, but certainly a lot. Out of the 6,000 people on the island, about two to two and a half thousand people died. And it was in those first few minutes because they were just trapped inside the bungalows, inside the hotel rooms on the First Level or two, because we're it's the worst place possible essentially to be for for what happened that day. So I'm reaching around for air, and I can't find any.
James Newell:And in my mind I'm thinking, okay, so I'm in water, I can't find any pockets of air and I can't break the structure that I mean, even this is flimsy wooden shed with big ideas basically. But I can't break the structure, And then it dawned on me, and then I started to panic. And I lost control of my diaphragm, so I started to drown, basically. So I was forced to take in my first breath of water, and drowning is as uncomfortable and suffocating as you might think it is. So at the time we described of if you took kind of like wood and glass and concrete and also mixed up, put it in a pint glass of water and forcibly threw that down somebody straight.
James Newell:That's what drowning felt like because all the debris and everything. In my lucid state, I was thinking, well, I'm either gonna get brain damage if I get out of this or I'm ultimately gonna die. So I panicked to start thrashing around, which you're not supposed to do. But at this point, all bets were off as I said, this is it. And then I started thinking, oh my God, what a terrible life I've had.
James Newell:I'm 21. It's been really rubbish into this point. And I'm only here because it was rubbish and I'm trying to make good of it. I've ruined Christmas for my mum and my brother. They're not gonna know what happened to me.
James Newell:I didn't know what's happened to me. I said, oh God, what a disaster this is. And then just as I was about to give in, which I'm like, okay, breathe in that final breath of air, which I was absolutely convinced was gonna kill me, everything went completely, completely calm in my mind. And I had this weird notion and the best way to describe it is, if you're thirsty, you have a drink. If you're hungry, you need to eat.
James Newell:I had this urge to die, which sounds really dramatic, but it felt so so peaceful at the time and so so natural. I always joke with people, you know, the scariest part about dying is like watching the bus come towards you. But just before it hits you, you'll be perfectly fine and, you know, everything's cool at that point. So I've got into this really relaxed state. It was like, okay, here we go.
James Newell:And then because I'm a glass half full kind of person in every cloud, I think I got excited in a way. I was thinking, well, I'm absolutely certain I'm gonna die. There's no way I'm gonna get out of this. But on the flip side, I'm gonna find out what happens when you die. And I don't have to wait another God knows how many years to do that.
James Newell:It's like, oh, every cloud. So it's like, I was really curious. What what happens next? And as that's going through my mind, then I feel air on my face. And what happened was, all of the debris and all the other stuff is sweeping through across the isthmus and across the sea.
James Newell:And my bungalow collapsed, or kind of contorted like that, and I popped out the top like a lucky penny. And so which is just so disorientating. I consider myself a fairly intelligent person, but floating in the water and like seeing just bodies and debris and things around me. My first thought was the island is sinking, which is physically it was physically impossible. Right?
James Newell:But at the time, that's where I was. It's like, I don't know what's going on, but the world is ending and the the island is sinking and all I could see was just water from miles around. So I'm scrabbling about in the water thinking, I need to hold onto something, because otherwise I'm just gonna be completely washed through to the sea and that's it. Like, it is it is game over. Under the water, I can feel myself being hit by bits of debris and other stuff.
James Newell:And I was exceedingly lucky because I met lots of people that were missing limbs, missing all sorts of terrible terrible injuries, obviously fatalities, decapitations, all sorts of stuff from the sheet metal and all the debris under the water. That was really what was killing people more so than just drowning people. So at that point, I kind of float across, hold on to a tree. And then I think, hang on a minute, where's Higgie? Mark, the guy that I was doing, like, where is he?
James Newell:And water's in my eyes, all salty. Everything's all disorientated. So I think, oh my god, where is he? Where is he? I eventually lose my grip on that tree and then I'm back in the water saying, oh God, here we go.
James Newell:For about the millionth time today, I think I'm gonna I'm gonna actually die. So I'm scrabbling around with my eyes closed, scrabbling around and then a hand comes out, grabs mine, pulls me in and it's him. I feel like I floated from Thailand to bloody Sri Lanka or somewhere. Realistically, I probably floated about 10 or 20 meters, but it was so disorientating. I just couldn't work out where I was or what was going on.
James Newell:So he grabbed me. So you're alright? Yeah. I think I'm alright. And we kind of intertwined around the tree like this holding on for dear life and the tree is shuddering.
James Newell:And we're kind of convincing ourselves that the trees, you know, we're gonna be safe here. We'll just wait till the water drops. And around us, you can see other trees breaking in half and uprooting with people still holding on to them, kind of screaming like just going off into the bloody sea in the distance. I'm thinking, like this is pretty much as bad as it gets. But all we could do is hold on.
James Newell:Not long after, the water started to drop and it dropped at literally that kind of that's not even exaggeration. It was that kind of level, which at the time, like, great. Water equals death. No water equals safety. Brilliant.
James Newell:Bye bye water. This is gonna be wonderful. We didn't realize what the that movement significantly the amount of energy that takes to do that. So where most places in the tsunami, the sea receded, it came in, messed a lot of stuff up, and then it generally recede, recede, recede. We had recession, recession came in, came in, submerged, and then we had hundreds and hundreds of waves playing off against each other, but this was the first recession of the water.
James Newell:So we climbed down off the tree. I'm wearing my polo shirt, but my trousers are now missing. And my boxer shorts look like be kind of dipped in a shredder. He's completely naked and we realized that his ankle's actually broken, having said that he was fine. He's obviously full of adrenaline at that point.
James Newell:And we're looking around and this everything is gone. And there's just piles of debris everywhere. Dead people, bits of people, people screaming. And then somebody shouts, it's an American voice, I don't know if the person live. I have no idea who they are.
James Newell:There's no way I can find out who they are. Somebody shouted, it's coming again. And we didn't need that explained to us any more clearly than that. Luckily for us, where we were on the isthmus, it goes quite hilly at each edge like this. And so where hippies bar was over here, my bungalow is over here.
James Newell:We were quite close to kind of a, a higher ground bit. So we ran. He ran on his broken ankle. I ran on barefoot and through broken glass and bits of wood and everything else. And we just launched ourselves.
James Newell:So literally running for our lives. I literally know what that feels like. It's like I gave everything I've got. We launched ourselves onto the kind of stinging nettles and brush and started to climb up just as it swept in. There was a phrase at the time, seconds and centimeters.
James Newell:That was the difference between life and death. And it really, really was. If we'd have hesitate for a second to think, what does he mean? What do you mean by that? It's coming again.
James Newell:That would have been it. We instinctively just ran in and the water was through. So we start to climb up the the side of the hill and we're looking back on just all of the devastation and all the all the stuff. Marcus can be naked except for his digital wristwatch, which was an exciting look. So so you got some idea of what the time is, but we don't know how high is high enough to be safe.
James Newell:I've This has never happened before. I don't know where it's high enough. So we kept climbing as much as we could and we're under quite heavy canopy tree cover. So the logical lucid part of me is thinking, well, we're not gonna be spotted here to be rescued by helicopters or whatever, so we're gonna have to go down at some point. So we sat up there for a couple of hours, and waited and watched, and watching the waves come in and go, and come in and go.
James Newell:And then it eventually calm down. Then the helicopters and planes started appearing in the sky, which for us is a real sign of of rescue. And we made the decision to go back down. So we went back down and everybody's luggage was and all the stuff was just everywhere. So I was able to get myself a pair of shoes to protect my feet and Mark got some clothes, etcetera.
James Newell:And the plan was, we would go across the kind of the main pier of Pee Pee Island, steal one of the banana boats with the engine on the back, go out to deep water, flag down an oil tank or something, and that that was my, you know, in fact, back of a fact packet safety plan. That was what we were gonna do. And I'll never forget the feeling of when we climb back down, and we set foot on the sand, and you just look across and it was just rubble and devastation and then the sea, and rubble and devastation in the sea. And I was thinking, we're we're so vulnerable. The second we step foot on this land and we start walking across there, there is no protection.
James Newell:So if this happens, and bearing in mind, we don't understand what a tsunami is or what has happened. But we had a good few hours of it it seemed clear. But But I think if anything happened, that's it. We're we're gone. We're gonna be just taken straight out to sea.
James Newell:But we had no choice. So we made it across. We're walking across the sand and the debris. And there's mountains of around each palm tree, there's kind of mounds of debris and stuff, and you could hear kind of people groaning in them that, you know, that you couldn't have saved them. They were very, very mortally injured, dead bodies, bits of people, like, the worst you could possibly imagine.
James Newell:We eventually get to the beach, and the beach had dropped by about eight foot, so all the loose sand has been washed away. And of course, all the little boats, you know, it's like so I always describe it like salt bays, like it just been crumbled up into dust. Like, they were all gone. Everything was ruined. But what was there was the Phi Phi to Phuket ferry, the same ferry that took us to the island.
James Newell:They were rescuing people. So we get onto the ferry, and I thought we were safe, and we still weren't. We were still in danger. So we're on the ferry, we're talking to people, and they gave us some water, and are you okay? Because different people had different experiences of what happened.
James Newell:Some people were just on higher levels of hotels. I'm like, oh, this is an inconvenience. I have to end my holiday early. And there's people like us who's like, oh my God, nearly died like a thousand times today. I'm just in absolute PTSD shock here.
James Newell:What's going on? And it was like a movie. They're turning the engine of the boat on. It's going. All of the debris in the water is being sucked into the engines, and it means that the boat can't move.
James Newell:So people had to jump off the boat, swim under, they're like the guys who run the boat thing, taking the debris out. And the whole time we kind of sat there floating and it's eerily silent at this point. And I'm just thinking, I can see that wave coming like from the other side of the island, spinning the boat, killing us all. Like I could just imagine dying in any number of circumstances. And I'm just thinking, oh my God.
James Newell:I was, I was bored of being scared to death at that point. It's really weird. I was just, I remember I'm not religious, but I remember saying like, if you're gonna kill me, just do it now. Like this is boring. If you're gonna do it, stop messing with me.
James Newell:Just take me now because this is just, I can't handle this just constant stress and constant pressure. So eventually the boat kind of veers away a bit. We get the engine going. We dock with a slightly bigger boat and that's where we get hooked up with other people of varying degrees. So it was piles of kind of bodies and corpses.
James Newell:And then there's kind of walking wounded and the people who are absolutely fine. Most people were drunk because they were just in absolute pain. I met a guy who kind of severed his wrist and he had a nappy on his wrist. It was completely blood soaked. And he was just absolutely drunk out of his mind, trying to deal with the pain.
James Newell:It's like nightmare scenario. So then that boat docks in Phuket. Bearing in mind, I don't really know how far away Phuket is because this is long before like Google maps and everything else. And even if it was all my stuff is now at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. So I was like, I don't I don't know if we're safe here.
James Newell:Like, where are we? Where's the sea? We got taken to a place called Mission Hospital, Phuket. And I got wheeled into the reception. And it's so eerie because a couple of years well, quite a few years ago now actually, the film The Impossible came out.
James Newell:If you saw that, The Impossible. I watched that when it came out. I took my mom to see it, my wife, my brother, everybody that I could. Because as much as I can tell this story, like the visual depiction, it's absolutely spot on. Arguably it's better than I could ever describe it to you.
James Newell:But there's this interesting scene in the impossible, but where they they go through the double doors of the emergency department and it's just carnage everywhere. And then they turn around and there's a TV on the wall and it's like, blah, blah, blah, blah, all in Thai. That's That's exactly what happened to me. I got wheeled in. I couldn't walk.
James Newell:So I had debris and glass and stuff in my feet. And I'm kind of looking around and it's very disconcerting to hear people in the language you don't understand talking extremely quickly and in in a scared way about something that you don't know that you're safe from. I say, oh, my God. We're on the ground level here. I don't know how safe we are.
James Newell:What's going on? They took me through to the Operating Room just to essentially dip me in iodine and take all the bits of debris out of my feet. All the while, because I'm captain sensible. I'm saying, I can't pay for this. I don't have any ID or any money.
James Newell:And And they were kind of laughing at me. It's like, it's it's fine. Like, we know what's happened. It's cold. They admit Mark into the hospital because he had ingested enough water that he's he had water on the brains that he was hallucinating.
James Newell:He was in a much worse way than I was. And then they wheeled me into the reception with my little shoes that I'd had, and I refused to let go of them. And then that was it. They're like, right, we've got some other people. They always say, best of luck.
James Newell:And I'm sat there in the reception completely sunburned, starving, nearly died like a million times a day, cut to ribbons in a lot of pain. No passport, no money, nobody knows I'm alive. I didn't even know if I'm gonna live that day because I'm still on the Ground Floor. And I caught my reflection in like a pillar in the, in the, in the emergency room. I just burst into tears.
James Newell:I was like, Oh my God, what the, what the F do I do now? Like, what do I do? And at that point, the lift opens, a lady comes out and says a Thai lady is a UK. And there's always time for comedy. So typically I said, no.
James Newell:I'm not okay. Look look at the stay of me. I'm not okay. She said, my daughter is upstairs or her niece or something. She's had a motorcycle accident, not tsunami related, but but we have a room.
James Newell:And in that room, there's like a small bench. You can sleep on that bench. We will look after you. Come with me. So she wheeled me up to her room.
James Newell:And then so it's like the niece there, the mom, and then maybe there's mom's sister or something. And the radio's going crazy with Thai people talking crazy talk about everything that's going on. And they had a tie to English dictionary in the room. So all I could think to do so we communicated through that because English wasn't that great. And I just looked for the word lucky.
James Newell:I just pointed at it and pointed at myself. And the Thai word for lucky is And I met a lot of people on my journey who when I told them where I was, particularly Thai local people, they just went white as a sheet. Because where I it's like saying I was like the 90 First Floor of the World Trade Center. I saw the whites of the pilot's eyes. Yeah, but I'm fine.
James Newell:Here I am. It's like it's just unlike I shouldn't have I shouldn't have lived, basically. It was just so such a such a slight margin. So she wheels me up there, starts to take care of me. The next day, I get taken out to the Internet cafe so I can at least contact home.
James Newell:And I didn't want to tell my mom's a huge worrier, so I didn't tell her what happened. I just said, you know, I lost some of my stuff, so I've got to come back. So I've got my passport, blah, blah, blah. I didn't want to give her the full details. Said I'm in the hospital.
James Newell:I'm just chatting up the nurses, but I'll be back in a couple of days. Don't worry. And then I got taken to the town hall in Phuket, where they identified me with fingerprints and took mug shots, etcetera. Took a statement from me. I spoke to the British consulate who, I'm a patriot, but they were embarrassingly poor.
James Newell:Unfortunately, I was basically left to my own devices. And then I was given a lift in the back of a pickup truck to Phuket Military Airbase, where I was given like a deli counter number for my flights. It's like now serving number 42 at the deli counter. So that was my plane ticket to get on a military plane to go up to Bangkok. Because then that's where everybody was then dispersing from back around the world.
James Newell:So I got on this military plane, which is one of those ones with no windows whatsoever that they have tanks and stuff in. So it's just hundreds of people on this plane. And again, from the corpses and dead bodies to the really wounded, to the not so bad, to the people who just lost their camera or something really really trivial indeed. So we get on that flight and I'm holding on and it's like being on a bus. So I'm holding on tight this thing and then the plane takes off like this.
James Newell:And I'm kind of stood there in my rags just thinking, oh, is this was supposed to like help me reset the Etch A Sketch of my life. Like this is far worse than where I've just come from. This is wild. Like, Oh my goodness. What's happened?
James Newell:Mark wasn't with me at that point. Cause I missed a bit of the story. Before I got there, I visited Mark in his hospital bed and he'd been in the military And he said to me, I've been through an awful lot of stuff. I've killed people and I've seen people be killed and I've helped my friends kill themselves when they've been mortally wounded, blah, blah, blah. I'm going to deal with this by pretending this never happened because I just cannot cope with this.
James Newell:So as a result, I'm never going to speak to you again. It's nothing personal, but that is how I'm going to deal with it. And I say, well, that doesn't sound like a very healthy thing to do because who am I going to talk to? But there we go. Thanks very much.
James Newell:And what I did still have at the time was a chain around my neck, a Saint Christopher of all things. And it had the key to our little locker on the Island with all of our money and passports and stuff in it. And he made me give him that key because he was going to go back and get our stuff when he was well. I was like, mate, like the building's gone. It's like it's all gone.
James Newell:Like you can have the key, but it's all, all gone. Like I don't think you realize just how bad this is. So he re I'm still to this day, I spoke to him once on an email only because I really pushed for it. He's never spoken to me ever again because that's how he was going to deal with it. So anyway, they they put me on that plane.
James Newell:I get to Bangkok and that's when being captain sensible came into play. So I phoned my mom, all the phone calls and faxes and things are free. We're still faxing at that point. That's how long ago it was. So I phoned my mom and said, it's time.
James Newell:Send the fax. So she sent me a 36 page fax to Bangkok Airport and it had my passport, my tickets, my immunization, all the stuff that I would need to prove my identity and to actually be able to do anything. And I was able to cash in my round the world ticket to get my flight home. And if I wasn't able to do that, if I didn't have a round the ticket, it was business and first only because obviously everybody was trying to get flights out, etcetera. It would have been about £6,000 at least to get a flight home.
James Newell:So I managed to cash him around the ticket and the British consulate gave me a shame I still don't have it now. This really badly photocopied piece of paper, which was essentially good for one entry to The UK, which I was to use at the other end because they didn't actually have my real passport. So I got loaded onto the plane, just felt really sorry for myself on the plane ride on the way back. And like, so I was in this amazing place, all the money and time in the world. Everything was wonderful.
James Newell:Sunshine every day. Flying back into rainy old London, having nearly died like a million times thinking, it was a bit crap, wasn't it? So my so I get to passport control at Heathrow and a police officer escorts me through. And the lady I'll never forget this. The lady at passport control kind of looks me up and down.
James Newell:Bear in mind, I've been like my tattered rags that have been donated from the hospital donation box. And And the tsunami is clearly a thing that has happened, and she was kind of examining this thing. I did shout a few naughty things at her, unfortunately. I was like, just let me through. Like, come on.
James Newell:This is this I'm with the police officer of Christ. I said, this is legit. Just let me in. So I got let in. My mom picked me up, and she kind of burst into tears, realized, you know, just how bad it had been for me.
James Newell:I went straight to the doctors who just checked me over, and that was it. And I went home. And five hundred hours of counseling later, I can tell you the story without getting teary about it or anything like that, but it's a big, big moving story for sure.
Peter Ely:No. Definitely. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that experience.
James Newell:No problem. No problem.
Peter Ely:I, I try and take it all in. It's
James Newell:Yeah.
Peter Ely:It's incredible. And there's so
James Newell:much more detail as well. I I'm I'm aware of your time. I could talk to you all day about it. So many details to
Peter Ely:go. I can I can well believe it? I can well believe it. It it there's a few things that kind of stuck out with me there when you said you know you you woke up and you felt that the island was sinking.
James Newell:Yeah.
Peter Ely:I I was in I was in Bermuda and I went to the Bermuda, nothing nothing happened in the way that things happen to you but I went I went to their aquatic center and Bermuda is like a bunch of tiny little islands on the top of a volcano and they've got a satellite picture of it and instantly as soon as I saw that my primitive brain went oh my god. We're gonna fall into the volcano. So I can I can kind of understand where where that comes where that comes from? One one of the things we love to talk about on the podcast is how we cope. Right?
Peter Ely:And and, you know, obviously, you've gone through something that not not many people will ever go through. Right? Touch wood.
James Newell:Thankfully. Yeah.
Peter Ely:What you you've talked a little bit about how you survived the instant kind of the instant part of it. Mhmm. How did it impact you then when you were back home? When you were technically, you were safe, but, you know, you've still got that you've you've talked about Mark used avoidance, which we know is
James Newell:a Totally. Yeah.
Peter Ely:A technique that people do use to get over trauma. What what did you do? I know you said you went through the counseling, but what kind of things did that help you with? What did it
Benn Baker-Pollard:how did you move forward?
James Newell:Well, I had an awareness of counseling because of what happened to us previously. So before my dad actually took his life, we had six failed suicide attempts. So we'd had a really, really horrendous time. And obviously I know now their cries for help. He didn't actually want to go through with it.
James Newell:I understand that now, but at the time I was just angry with him. So I was aware of counseling and my mum tried to take me to counseling and I wasn't up for it at that point. And I can tell them where they could go. So I was only, you know, 14, 15 at the time. I've got enough going on.
James Newell:Thank you very much. But I intrinsically knew I needed to speak to somebody and ask for help. So in the immediate after Martha coming back, I had generalized anxiety disorder, like off the scale. I still have it now, but it was off the scale. If I was getting in a car, it was gonna crash.
James Newell:The house was gonna fall down around me. I could imagine in any circumstance how easy it could be to be killed just like crushing a bug. I had this real awareness of life is so it's just embarrassingly fragile. So that was very, very difficult. I had flashbacks.
James Newell:I had nightmares. And also I became obsessed with finding James from Hippie's Bar. So I looked at because obviously you meet people, You don't ask them for their ID, do you? So I just knew him as James, white guy from Norfolk. I thought it was.
James Newell:I didn't know. So I started looking through all of the survivalists, all of the bodies, thousands of pictures of bodies, trying to find him and find out what happened. And I did find him. And he did die. And he died at Hippies Bar.
James Newell:And if I'd have stayed, that would have been my end also. And I have this thought of when I met him, I mean, we've all got like an invisible timer above our head of when our time will come. But when I met him, his one literally had like twelve hours left on the clock, and nobody had any idea. It was that was really moving for me, particularly because same name as me, about the same age. I was like, and they were trying their best to get me to stay and drink through the night.
James Newell:So a lot of flashbacks, a lot of generalized anxiety disorder. And also whilst I don't go into avoidance and things like that, for me, like eating is a form of control. So I stopped eating self care kind of stopped for for a good while. And then I spoke to the counseling lady and I went in for my first kind of assessment and with a big smile on my face, I kind of rattled through. I said, well, my dad killed himself.
James Newell:And then I went to traveling and then the tsunami happened and I nearly died and this and that. And I haven't eaten in a few days and I'm not taking care of myself, blah, blah, blah. Please fix me with a big smile on my face. She was like, Oh my God, this is going to take a while. So I was with her with for, for a few years and all she really did because it wasn't CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy.
James Newell:I don't know what the term is for it. So I just call it the talking one. So she basically just encouraged me to talk as much as possible. That was it. And just really talk through as much as possible and then to think about it from different perspectives and just to try and understand it in different re reframe in different dimensions and through just absolutely talking it to death, it did help.
James Newell:But after a couple of years, I felt like I'd had enough of it and I didn't want to be dependent on it forever. So I came away from it. I dabbled with antidepressants as well, but I've I think I had fluoxetine, something like that. But I found that far from making me feel kind of okay and safe and level, it just depersonalized me. So I felt nothing at all.
James Newell:Because I'd rather feel terrible than feel nothing. So that didn't really work for me. And so over the over the coming years, I kind of drifted in and out of counseling and CBT as and when I needed it. And CBT was a lot better for me because that's our logical practical man. It's like, when I think like this, then this happens and blah blah blah.
James Newell:So that was quite good to make sense of that. But there's still that kind of emotional and irrational side where I know I shouldn't do certain things, but I'll do them anyway because of how I feel. So one big thing I did was I gave up drinking. So when my oldest son, Ralph, he's 11 years old, when my wife was pregnant with him, I stopped drinking because I had a parent that drunk. And whilst I wouldn't have called him an alcoholic necessarily, it definitely exacerbated the situation that we're in.
James Newell:And I did not want that to happen. So I became t total, which is a real kind of safety mechanism for me. Because I know if I if I drink It's funny because people think I've got ultimate will power by not drinking. Actually, I've got I've got no will power. So I can't trust myself to have one drink.
James Newell:I have to have no drinks, and that's the safest path. So, so it's that. And then CBT worked very, very well. And then I kind of drift in and out if I feel if I'm not feeling so great, I know how to handle myself now and what to do. And I know what the warning signs are.
James Newell:Like if I start skipping meals or if I skip self care and things like that, those are my warning signs that I'm not feeling that great and I need to do something about it. And I've got some really good friends. Funny I'll share something with you actually. So I created something which I called the traffic light system. So it's very difficult for me to text you and say, Hey, Peter, not feeling very great.
James Newell:Can we have a chat? Because as men, that's very hard to do. So I created this system of, and obviously I explained this to them beforehand and then we used it, which was, I would send you a police officer emoji and it's the flag. It's the flag police. So you're either going to send me a white flag, which means I'm great.
James Newell:A black flag, which means I'm not great and I need help or a checkered flag. So, kind of in the middle. But for the want of just one emoji, I can then essentially say, Peter, how you doing? There's the emoji. You respond back with a black one, go, not very good.
James Newell:And then I can then say, are you okay? And and it gets over that first hurdle of, because for men in particular, even though I asked for counseling and I did it and I'm really proud that I did, like, I'm not ashamed at all. I'm really proud that I was able to do that. And I don't know where I knew to do that from, but it's still hard sometimes say, actually, I need to talk. Actually, I need some help.
James Newell:So that kind of policeman flag emoji system worked really well because I don't need words then to express myself, which I think for men in particular is quite quite a useful thing.
Peter Ely:Yeah. No. That's fantastic. We've had we've had a lot of different different people from different organizations on the group and finding that initial talking point is is really the way forward. I do have more points I want to say but I'm mindful that we haven't brought Ben and Gary into the into the conversation.
Peter Ely:Gents have you got anything you'd like to ask James or or to to talk about?
Benn Baker-Pollard:James, I mean, that's, you know, one in a million chance for people to experience that or that kind of thing, you know, and to survive and come out the other side. What's the benefit it's brought to you?
James Newell:Well, the the it's funny because the benefit which you might think is I live each day like it's my last. No. I still worry about double yellow lines and parking tickets and things like that. But it's definitely given me perspective on life. It's given me perspective.
James Newell:And I think through the counseling and through the CBT, it's helped me to understand myself better. So I understand how I behave and also how other people behave. So I'm not mad at Mark for what happened or not anymore because I understand that. I'm not mad at my dad anymore because I understand it. And I understand he's got his troubles he had to deal with and blah, blah, blah.
James Newell:So I think that's what it's given me. And I do say that if I live my life again, I wouldn't change a thing. I would do it all again. Like it's like as terrible as it's been, there there is good that comes from it. And I'm I met some people.
James Newell:So when I was obsessed with dead bodies and finding James and all this other stuff, I met some people that had a very similar experience. And the peep so I consider myself lucky to have survived, but I met a lot of people who are who felt unlucky to have been there. And there those were their lives that got destroyed because they took that negative route. Whereas I just consider myself a lucky person. And because I'm hilarious, I actually do have lucky tattooed on my back.
James Newell:But in the in the Thai script, because, yeah, I consider myself extremely lucky. So I guess to answer your question, it's perspective. I've got a real perspective and an understanding on my own kind of emotions and behaviors.
Benn Baker-Pollard:Thanks.
Gary Johannes:So I my mind just went slightly sideways. I know quite a few people have Thai and Chinese symbols from different meanings, and it's actually not what they think it means. So you did check. You did check that, didn't you?
James Newell:I checked 30 times. 30 times with
Gary Johannes:lots of people. Lucky.
James Newell:100% it does. Yeah. 100%. I had it checked a lot. Yeah.
James Newell:And then I had it done as a henna tattoo. Yeah. And then I checked it and asked some type here. So what do you think it says? And then I got it done properly.
James Newell:So it
Peter Ely:doesn't it
Gary Johannes:doesn't cool. It's it's clever.
James Newell:It I told you. I was captain sensible. It doesn't say lampshade or anything like that. Yeah.
Gary Johannes:I I've got, like, as always, a a million questions, but it's I've got no questions about the tsunami because I don't think anybody can tell that story better than somebody who's been through that. I don't think it's easy to somebody else to conjure that up. So it sounds like a great point you went through in your life. Good, bad, indifferent, but it was a point of something. What then went on towards the benefits, but, actually, we know you had some counseling from CBT.
Gary Johannes:But, actually, you're now a father of three children, I think you said. You're clearly are a successful business owner. How much has that created the ability to look at you know, we talk about resilience a lot. It's a bit of a buzzword, unfortunately. But how much is that lifestyle before you went on holiday to rewrite your extra sketch, then having a different version of an extra sketch?
Gary Johannes:You did rewrite it, but got a different one. And now you were successful or somewhat successful in your own lifestyle. How was that implicated? How were those experiences implicated the current success?
James Newell:So I think it comes from it's nothing to do with the tsunami and it's everything to come from. It's quite classic, isn't it? Like, righting the wrongs of of the parent. So because my dad essentially abandoned me, which I realized now through PTSD and other stuff. Like, that's a really big thing.
James Newell:So I wasn't enough and neither was my brother for him to stay alive, even though the relationship was terrible. So like that's a really, really amazing thing to happen. And for me it's like righting those wrongs and it's very interesting how life repeats itself. So I've got two boys and a girl. So Ralph, then George, then Lucy.
James Newell:And I was at a point where I didn't have my business. I was in a job. So, so when I came back from the tsunami, I kind of, after about a year or so, I fell back into the world of work. I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but I knew I liked cars. I kind of fell into the motor trade and I was supposed to be there for six months and ended up being there for about twelve years, which was exciting.
James Newell:But I, I started my own business because I had this big urge of like, I have to set a good example for my kids. I, cause I was so miserable at Mercedes and I've had, you know, I've had anxiety, I've had depression, I've had suicidal ideation. I've had all of these things. So I was really aware of like the impact, the negativity of work was having on me. So I started my own business and I was in this position where I left my pretty stable job as a husband with a wife and two young boys, which was exactly the situation my dad was in.
James Newell:He was a husband with a wife with two young boys and he had his own business. He didn't do very well. Unfortunately, I think that was part of the struggles of, of his demise was that. And then he medicated with alcohol and it kind of all got worse. Yeah.
James Newell:As I left as I left my work, I was thinking, this is like a carbon copy of exactly what happened. And everybody's thinking, oh, you're excited for your new business. I was thinking, no, I just don't want this to be the first step to my new business. I was thinking, no. I just don't want this to be the first step to my inevitable suicide when it all goes wrong.
James Newell:Like, without sanity flippant about it. So I don't want to I don't want to repeat that. So that really played on me for the longest time. And I've moved past it now. And now my youngest daughter's here.
James Newell:We've got three of them. It's there's less of a comparable. But but to answer your question, it's about that. It's like anybody's had a terrible kind of childhood. It's trying to make good and trying to give my kids what I didn't have.
James Newell:So, all I do all sorts of stuff for my kids and I make sure I'm there for them emotionally and we talk a lot and I'm at home a lot, not just because of the pandemic and everything. I really want to spend a lot of time with them growing up, all the things that I never had basically. So that's really what it's done for me. And that's more of his suicide and everything that happened with him than the tsunami. The tsunami is just like this weird detour on the way.
James Newell:Because the suicide of a parent on its own is just a life defining terrible event, let alone that.
Gary Johannes:We we had a young guy on one of the podcast earlier on who talks about abandonment and Mhmm. How he's now a father and things like that, and he's a successful business coach. Interestingly, I think the other guys would see this as well. We see so many people who've had that lifestyle, that childhood, the early years start, who then go and repeat the behaviors of the father or the mother or whoever. Mhmm.
Gary Johannes:The self awareness you've just shown to go, I don't want to repeat it, that's self awareness. And where do you think that come from?
James Newell:Hundreds of hours of counseling. And and an intrinsic notion of the buck stops with me. So it's my responsibility to stop all this silliness going forward.
Gary Johannes:But that intrinsic bit because I've seen people who've been through hundreds of hours of counseling, because they're looking for someone to blame, to hang it on. And they still they still take no responsibility for their future because it's a I can't change my future because this is what my past is.
James Newell:You
Gary Johannes:grab your future and taking control of it by the sounds of it.
James Newell:I suppose it's within me. Just the notion of, like, I've got one life. I gotta live it as best I can. And it is up to me. Like, I didn't cause a tsunami to happen.
James Newell:I didn't cause to have my dad. But I can choose my response to it. So it's like responsible is able to choose a response. Right? So I've always been kind of aware of that.
James Newell:And also now I'm a dad. Like I couldn't imagine, even in my darkest of darkest moments, I couldn't imagine doing what he did. Just out of sheer bloody mindedness, I wouldn't because I just would refuse to repeat history. But yeah, I don't know. It's it's I just have this intriguing thing.
James Newell:I just the buck stops with me. Like if I can stop this generational thing. And I found out through the years that actually his father also killed himself.
Gary Johannes:That's what I'm saying.
James Newell:That's what I'm saying. Which was exciting. So yeah. So it runs through.
Gary Johannes:So you you just said a quote, which I want you to say again slower and clearer. I'm gonna gonna hand over to one of the other guys
James Newell:Sure.
Gary Johannes:About responsibility. What did you say?
James Newell:Well, responsibility is responsible is being able to choose your response. So whatever happens to you, you can choose how you respond to it. And however unfair it might feel, and you could argue I've had some pretty unfair things happen to me. Yeah. But but you can still choose how you respond to that.
James Newell:And if I hadn't have stopped drinking, and if I'd have blamed my dad, blamed the tsunami, and blah blah blah, and I'm unlucky to be there rather than lucky to have survived, I probably wouldn't be talking with you today, to be honest. And the
Gary Johannes:short version of that is You said responsibility is response.
James Newell:You're able to choose your response. So responsible, you're able to choose your response. It's not what happens to you. It's what you do about it.
Gary Johannes:Fantastic. If it was written,
Benn Baker-Pollard:that that just relates to what we teach, basically, which is making a a really prominent point in in solution focused side of it. And I think the people that are listening to the podcast and listening to your your, you know, the tsunami, it probably gonna be the thing that stands out as a major part of the story. But for those people who are there who aren't gonna face a tsunami in their life at that same level or that same scale or the things that have happened, it may be dealing with those simpler challenges, albeit they're enough of a challenge to that individual. I think that statement about being responsible is about being able to choose how you to respond to those situations is probably the key takeaway here. Because, you you know, that does mean the difference between whether you feel anxiety and panic or whether you look at it and take a practical mindset and take steps to solve it and move forward with your life.
Benn Baker-Pollard:In terms of you know, you talked about hundreds of hours of counseling that you've gone through Mhmm. And CBT. Was there a point where you decided what to go down the route of, or did you just kind of fall into that? Was it just I need to talk to someone and it ended up being counselling? Or did you sound like you're the sort of person that would also analyse every option available.
Benn Baker-Pollard:Was it a case of looking at all the different therapies out there and concluding that counseling was the one for you and CBT, or was it just
James Newell:I fell into it. I fell into counseling because I've been offered it before. My mom tried to get it for me. Because she was aware of obviously I had this huge impact these, but even before he'd killed himself, the like witnessing the suicide attempts and he threatened us with violence. He threatened to kill us and burn us alive and all sorts of terrible things.
James Newell:So she was aware that we needed to talk, not that I was ready for it. So So I kind of fell into that, but then I'd done it so much to death that as much as I love my counselor and it really helped me at the end, I was like, we're just not getting anywhere anymore. Like, is there anything else? And she said, Oh yeah, well there's CBT. I was like, sorry.
James Newell:What's that? And then that was when I understood about CBT. And that was really cool because with the CBT thing, it's a lot more practical. So it's not the soft touchy feel. It's how do you feel, etcetera, which totally has its place.
James Newell:But at that point, I'm just like, to my point, I fixed me. And I know that's a a flippant thing to say is not possible, but that was my approach. I fixed me. Like, there must be a way. So when I, started working with my CBT therapist, like, tell me the books you are reading and I will read all of them.
James Newell:Like, tell me where you're at and I'll match up to where you're at and that'll make it a lot quicker, won't it? Because if I can speak your language and say, I've got a bit of black and white thinking going on here and blah blah blah, you're not gonna have to explain these concepts to me. We're gonna we're gonna speed up the process. So I fell into it, and then I really was able to take control of it after that.
Benn Baker-Pollard:So just give me give us give everybody listening a quick sort of thirty second snapshot of what CBT actually entails.
James Newell:Well, well, my understanding of CBT, which is cognitive behavioral therapy, is understanding thought patterns. So why you think the way you think and then taking control of it. So if something bad happens to me now and then I immediately feel scared or like I need to have a drink or take some drugs or punch somebody or whatever, I can then kind of remove myself. So, oh, okay. I feel like I want to do that as a response to that because I feel this way.
James Newell:And that's essentially where I can then interject and say, well, that's not a good idea, is it? I should probably take the better route there. And nine times out of 10, I'm able to do that. There's sometimes when you can't, but nine times out of 10. But really, it's like that stepping back.
James Newell:It's like observing the situation as a third person really and looking for the most pragmatic solution. That's my understanding of it. And then obviously, they give labels to everything, black and white thinking, etcetera.
Benn Baker-Pollard:Yeah. That was it. Because you would mention black and white thinking and people are gonna get what on earth is it?
James Newell:What what's what's the other one? It's rumination. There's there's a few key phrases in there for for kind of things in CBT. But that was key for me. So it's like, let me understand because I can help myself and I can help you, and we can kind of accelerate this process, which probably goes against what they're trying to do.
James Newell:Because like, we're willing to give these things time and space to breathe, but it helped me because I felt more in control. And I guess with the tsunami and the suicide and everything, I felt a distinct lack of control. So that's probably why I'm I'm looking for it in all all areas
Benn Baker-Pollard:of my life. Yeah.
Peter Ely:There's been there's been some really lovely things that you've mentioned that that I kinda wanna highlight if you don't mind because I know we're getting close to time. Yeah. We we talk about when we're talking to clients, we talk about insurmountable danger causes us anxiety, and we talk about also slow gradual danger that causes us to have this anxiety. And it seems like you went through both of those. You know, you had your father and that caused that slow, constant anxiety, and then obviously the tsunami, which was the insurmountable danger incident.
Peter Ely:Right? Which is just amazing. I've never met someone who's gone through both like that. And then you've you've you've really rationalized it so well because you're right. You do choose your response to how those things have happened.
Peter Ely:And and your version and Mark's version of that are two very different responses to the very same incident
James Newell:Mhmm.
Peter Ely:Which is something that we talk about. And and you talked I can't remember exactly what you said, but you said you took this very positive step out of it and being lucky. Maybe that was the thing. Maybe just finding that word in the Yeah. In that dictionary has helped you have that positive outlook on it, which I thought was fantastic.
James Newell:I do consider myself a lucky person despite everything that's happened. Object object objectively, I'm not a lucky person, but I am because I survived it. And that and, you know, I've always stuck with that.
Gary Johannes:Well, it's the so it's just perspective and different people because I've got a friend who had a serious car accident, and he lost his arm.
James Newell:Wow.
Gary Johannes:And he considered himself lucky.
Peter Ely:Yeah. Because he's because
Gary Johannes:he's left handed. Left his right hand. Yeah. And we three things went along with that. And each one of these yeah.
Gary Johannes:But I was lucky because this happened, and I I was lucky because that happened. And I'm like, okay.
James Newell:And a bit bit of humor helps as odd, isn't it? I think.
Gary Johannes:Yeah. But he was lucky
James Newell:because
Gary Johannes:because he lost one arm, and it wasn't the army used a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Like, in comparison, I'm like, okay. And it's that ability to go, what's the solution?
Gary Johannes:And and I think we, you know, we can go, we're lucky. Mhmm. But then what next?
James Newell:Yeah.
Gary Johannes:And I think what Peter, Ben, and I do is we build on, okay. This is where you are today. Where do you go from here? Where CBT helps you manage your processes, but it doesn't talk about how the future pacing and goal setting and everything else is with where we work. And that's what and we look work a lot on neuroscience.
Gary Johannes:Mhmm. So we give a more detailed understanding of everybody's reactions and why they're reacting to that.
James Newell:Mhmm.
Gary Johannes:And it's it it changes our concept a little bit more. So you get much better clearer picture
James Newell:of
Gary Johannes:where you want to go. Mhmm. The new newer plasticity happens, and it overwrites a lot of that. Those pathways which don't help you. So there's a difference in that.
Gary Johannes:But you've having that mindset of I'm lucky or I can still do some of my cup's half full Mhmm. Really drives it forward Mhmm. Which only the individual can have. So that's, you know or quite often, they find it through those challenging times. So they they make that decision in that moment, and we see a lot of change like that.
Benn Baker-Pollard:Mhmm. You could say you're lucky. You could also say you're probably one of the you're rich. You're wealthy in in but not in the monetary sense. You're wealthy in a sense that a lot of people in life will never get to or or wanna experience the self awareness that's been brought about by your experience.
Benn Baker-Pollard:Yeah. Appreciation and pragmatism to be able to make decisions in life with perspective. In fact, you know, you look at people in society and there are people today who couldn't cope with something as simple as a bill coming to to the mail the mail because they don't they can't work out how to get past the fact that they can't afford to pay for it or something similar. And, you know, to that to that extreme end, of all the people that can see in their life, the only way they can see their happiness being is by being a millionaire. And and that's and they chase they chase a dream that will never arrive.
Benn Baker-Pollard:Or when they does when it does arrive, they wonder why they're sat there depressed and and haven't fulfilled their life with some desire or what they thought was gonna be there. So I'd say you're a very wealthy person in that sense in what you can take away from it and what you've been able to change in terms of your perspective. So if you were gonna give Joe public, average Joe blogs or, you know, who's someone who's listening to this, any sort of guidance about their life or taking something forward. I can see your brain's ticking already. Yeah.
James Newell:So what Firearm, like, a thousand things. What can I do? Yeah. Yeah.
Benn Baker-Pollard:If you could pin this back to something and you might not be able to, but if you can, what would be a starting point for you?
Peter Ely:To move forward,
Benn Baker-Pollard:to be able to get you.
James Newell:I think the main thing for me is the being able to choose your response thing. And, and because in that it's kind of implied that the emotion is removed. So to use your bill analogy, Oh, that's a big bill we've received. I wouldn't have enough money to pay that bill. Well, what are our actual options here?
James Newell:Rather go immediately going to panic mode because I think that's what being able to choose your response for me kind of implies. It's taking the emotion out and taking the urgency out because depending like to use a bill analogy, you probably got a good two, three weeks. You could do nothing with it. It wouldn't really matter to anybody. But when when we get into situations, we tend to panic and pressure ourselves unnecessarily and make stupid decisions, when actually you could have probably slept on it for a couple of days and then casually come to it.
James Newell:And that's something I have to learn because I'm very, very fast paced. I think quickly, I talk quickly. I won't do everything yesterday. You know, I haven't got time to be impatient, but actually just Yeah. Trusting the process and letting time take care of itself is a big part, but choosing your response.
James Newell:So here is the bill. Okay. We don't have the money. What can we actually do? We can borrow the money.
James Newell:We can speak to the people and tell them we can't pay and blah, blah, blah. There's always options. There's always something. But for a lot of us, myself included, even now, depending what the button is, money's a button for a lot of people, you go straight to that kind of sharp emotional response. And that's when silly things happen.
James Newell:That's when you might go to your coping mechanism of choice. And depending on what that is, you, you know, things are going to go well or not. So I think that's it. It's choosing a response and trying to take the emotion out of things and just slow down. Because apart from, like you say, something really immediate like the tsunami, you generally got time to deal with most situations.
Peter Ely:Yeah. That's
Benn Baker-Pollard:fantastic. Points. Remove the emotion and you've got time.
Peter Ely:Yeah. Yeah. That's brilliant. Thank you. There's a book that I think that resonates with me that if you haven't read it, then I think you should because you'll probably identify a lot in it.
Peter Ely:It's called The Luck Factor by Oh, I've not
James Newell:read that one.
Peter Ely:It's brilliant. It's a really great book. I mean, some of the stuff that you're saying is it's stuff that he's he's kind of brought up on and and talked about in his studies.
James Newell:I just wanna quantify one I know we're nearly over on time. I just wanna quantify one point on luck. I consider myself lucky, but I don't rely on luck as in, you know, I'm sat at home manifesting things and taking no actions. So I consider myself lucky, but I put in the work and I put myself in lucky positions. So I'm not waiting for things happen.
James Newell:I'm making it happen.
Gary Johannes:You make it. You employ a lot.
James Newell:I'm I'm looking for the lucky things.
Peter Ely:That's exactly what he says, and this is why I think you will really like that book.
James Newell:Yeah. Thank you.
Peter Ely:I'll get that. Thank you.
Gary Johannes:We are all I hear is you don't try and control the things you can't control.
Peter Ely:Mhmm.
Gary Johannes:And too many people try and push back the waves. And you you you know, look. That's a bit of a weird thing to say today, isn't it?
James Newell:That's alright.
Gary Johannes:Just heard that.
James Newell:I'm cool with it. It's fine.
Gary Johannes:You know? They they they tried to change the outcome they have no control over.
James Newell:Yeah. There's a lot to be said for and it there's following up, there's a lot of, like, water based analogies for this stuff. But there's a lot to say for going with the flow in certain situations and just trusting the process and seeing what happens. Yeah. And and let letting go to a degree.
James Newell:Yeah. Absolutely.
Peter Ely:So thank you very much, James. It's been absolutely lovely chatting with you and and learning about your story. Before we go, would you like to tell people how they can get hold of you and and what you do now? What's what's your day job? How do you help people now?
Peter Ely:And what they can do to reach out to to get in touch with you?
James Newell:Yeah. Sure. So the best place to find me is is on LinkedIn. So I'm there, James Newell. And what I actually do now, my company is called Clear Sales Message, and I help businesses to articulate their value proposition.
James Newell:So through the process of the tsunami and everything else, I went down this track of I want to do work that I love and I'm good at. And through BNI, funny enough, and networking, I realized I had a great a great skill for simplifying complex offerings for businesses, and it's quite a valuable thing for them. And that's now what I do, and I set a good example for my kids in doing so. So clear sales message is the name of my business, but LinkedIn is the best place to find me.
Peter Ely:Fantastic. Thank you very much, James.
James Newell:You're welcome.
Benn Baker-Pollard:Gents, do
Peter Ely:you want to say goodbye and the last final thought from from yourself, Gary?
Gary Johannes:Yeah. So listen. That was the most fascinating story. Had me hooked all the way through. You describe it really well and really articulately.
Gary Johannes:And I'm just very inspired by your journey since then. Not that bit. That wasn't inspiring, but actually what you chose to do since then. So absolutely love to get you back on the podcast, actually, because I think you've got a lot to offer from men's mental health and men in general. So just been a pleasure listening to you and being part of sharing that story to a wide audience.
Gary Johannes:Thank you.
Peter Ely:And Ben?
Benn Baker-Pollard:Yeah. No. Likewise, James. I
James Newell:think
Benn Baker-Pollard:thank you very much for coming on. It's been an absolute pleasure to listen to you and hear your story. You definitely can articulate it well because you brought alive all those action movies that we sit and watch, like you talked about, impossible. You know, you've been there and actually been through that scenario. I think what is impressive is how you've come around and you've made that choice and ability now to choose your perspective, remove your emotion, and choose how you react and respond to situations that you face in life, which has made you, as I said, wealthy in one respect.
Benn Baker-Pollard:And I do think I think Gary's right. I was gonna say it, but I think we've only really scratched the surface today.
James Newell:Oh, yeah. A %. I was looking at the time thinking one
Benn Baker-Pollard:one event in your life, we've had insight to two, you know, your dad's suicide, but I think there's a lot more that could come out of it. So I think it would be great if you came back on the podcast.
James Newell:Yeah. I'd love to. Love to.
Benn Baker-Pollard:Be really, really interesting to see where we can take it and what can come out. But thank you very much.
James Newell:Pleasure.
Peter Ely:Yes. Thank you very much, James. Really enjoyed your story. Didn't didn't realize just how good it was, but, yeah, thank you. It's you you life changing stuff.
Peter Ely:And and if you're if you're one of the people that are listening to this podcast and you're worried about your bills, maybe just some of the stuff that James has said there will will help you to understand that it's not as bad as it seems. So thank you very much.
Gary Johannes:Thank you for listening to the podcast that proves men do talk.
Benn Baker-Pollard:If you would like more information or support, then please visit inspiredtochange.biz,
Peter Ely:where you can learn more about us and the inspired to change team.
James Newell:And remember, the conversation continues on our social media at inspired men talk.
