Protecting The Human Behind The Badge

00:07
Brent Hinson
We all have a story to tell. Hello, and welcome to another edition of between the Lines with Virtual Academy. I am your co host, Brent Henson, and today’s topic is law enforcement specific, but it’s a subject that many of us struggle with every day that’s sacrificing our own well being because of a breakdown in our work life balance. Our guest today will be able to provide some direct insight, and hopefully that will allow all of us to examine the issue with both perspective and guidance. But before we get too deep into the conversation, allow some levity as we bring in our host, Mr. Michael Warren. How are you, sir?

01:00
Michael Warren
Man, I’m doing good. It’s a big day in my household today.

01:03
Brent Hinson
Seems like there’s always something going on in the Warren house.

01:06
Michael Warren
Yes. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, but today, the day that we’re recording things is my mom’s birthday, so I want to do a big birthday shout out to Sarah mama Sarah. Hope you’re having a happy birthday.

01:18
Brent Hinson
Very good.

01:19
Michael Warren
The big 77 today.

01:21
Brent Hinson
Nice.

01:22
Michael Warren
Yeah, great. Man, you start throwing up numbers like that meaningful. You know what I mean? You’ve been around for a while.

01:28
Brent Hinson
Yeah.

01:29
Michael Warren
I don’t know about you, Brent, but I’m not 77. But there are days I wake up when I feel like I am.

01:35
Brent Hinson
True story. I went to Xavier’s fifth grade Christmas party, and some of the kids looked around and said, is that Xavier’s grandpa? I literally was 41 at the time.

01:48
Michael Warren
Sometimes genetics and Mother Nature are unkind in what they do. But you know what, though? Our guest today, that has not been the case for him because Mother Nature has blessed him. Wouldn’t you agree?

02:01
Brent Hinson
I’m glad my wife is not on this video chat.

02:03
Michael Warren
Yeah, there are times where it’s a good thing we do audio, right? So why don’t you go ahead and tell us about him and bring him on?

02:10
Brent Hinson
Sure. Our guest today is a former San Antonio police officer with more than 15 years of experience, where he worked as both a patrol officer and as a member of the department’s mental health unit, actually helped develop their wellness program. Like many guests on this podcast, he’s also a veteran, serving this country for six years as a member of the United States Air Force. His current role finds him as a training coordinator for Firsthelp, an organization that works to reduce the stigma of mental health for first responders through education and advocacy work. You’ve heard us talk in depth about Firsthelp before with previous guest Joe Willis. It is our extreme pleasure to welcome to between the Lines Michael Moroda. Thanks for joining us today, man.

02:55
Michael Marotta
Oh, thank you, Brent. Thanks, Michael, for having me. And yeah. Happy birthday to Mama sarah 77, that is.

03:02
Michael Warren
I haven’t called her yet, but always call her and sing Happy Birthday because birthdays don’t matter. Well, mom, when you stop having them, that’s a bad thing, you know? So it may not like them, but the alternative is worse.

03:17
Michael Marotta
Yeah, absolutely.

03:18
Michael Warren
We really appreciate you being here today, and there are some, I guess we’ll call it administrative stuff that we should get out of the way first. Brent and I have expressed our what’s the word I’m looking for, Brent? Envy.

03:31
Brent Hinson
Yes. Okay. I don’t know where you’re going, but I’ll agree.

03:34
Michael Warren
This guy, he’s got to be a model at some point. He seriously in fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him on some commercials or something like that. How do you get that beard and that hair to be perfect every single time I see you, man?

03:53
Michael Marotta
That’s so funny. I appreciate the compliment. I don’t want anybody to be disappointed when they actually see me, but my wife laughs because I have a routine, and she’s like, dude, your hair care products and your routine, it takes us longer to get out of the house because of you than it does me. Purple shampoo and all. The curse of the white hair. Brent gets it used.

04:13
Brent Hinson
Some of that purple shampoo. My hairdresser said, you may want to lay off because your hair is turning purple now, so I know what you’re talking about.

04:20
Michael Marotta
Yeah. We’ll have an offline conversation about how.

04:23
Michael Warren
To use it responsibly everything in moderation. Moderation.

04:30
Michael Marotta
What people don’t realize about white hair is whatever you put in it’s going to take the color of the product. So you got to be really mindful. You put blue stuff, it looks blue. You put red stuff, it looks red.

04:41
Brent Hinson
I had the conditioner, too, so I was really going down a rabbit hole with that stuff.

04:45
Michael Warren
Well, I must have used the stuff they used on Wonder Woman jet, because there’s not a whole lot there. They didn’t take on the shape or color of anything other than gone. And Brent, I don’t know if I told you this or not, but Mike and I are actually taking a class together right now, and we meet via Zoom with our cohort. And one of the first classes, I referred to him as the man with the perfect hair and beard, and the look on his face was like, really? That’s where we’re going to go with this? It’s an interesting group with isn’t it, though, Mikey?

05:19
Michael Marotta
It is, yeah. I have thoroughly enjoyed all the different perspectives, and being with Dr. Omani and Rich Carr is like, every time they speak, it’s something that you got to write down. It’s almost too much. I have so many things on my scratch pad that I’m writing down. It’s incredible. Yeah.

05:40
Michael Warren
And for our listeners and a shout out to those folks there, we’re taking a class called Brain Centric instructional design. And if you’re a trainer, if you’re an educator, it doesn’t matter what field you’re in. I’m telling you, read the book, make the investment this class. Like Mikey said, man, I’m writing stuff down, and I’m having to go back and type it later because if I don’t, I won’t remember what it was I wrote. But it really has been good for me.

06:09
Michael Marotta
Yeah, I mean, especially for Mike. You and I have talked about it in that group. Coming from being career law enforcement and just looking at the way we train as law enforcement, and then I’m seeing how they’ve kind of changed the perspective from a cognitive. It’s opened my mind about how we train within law enforcement, how I train personally. It’s been incredible.

06:33
Michael Warren
Let’s go ahead and get our conversation started. I want to start with the Air Force. And I wasn’t an Air Force guy, but the Air Force holds a very special place in my heart because if it weren’t for the Air Force, my mom and my dad would not have met. My dad was Air Force, and he was from Indiana, and he ended up stationed at Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia, and that’s when he met my mom. So thank you. Into the wild blue yonder. But why did you choose Air Force?

07:01
Michael Marotta
Something that a lot of people don’t know is I originally enlisted in the Marine Corps, and at the time, my father in law, God rest his soul, was alive. My brother in law was a former Marine. My mother in law’s husband at the time was a Marine. My father is a Marine. So I got real quick a whole bunch of people that said, no, what are you doing? It was just where I felt like being led to. And honestly, I never considered the Air Force as a possibility. One thing that I do know about the Air Force was I wanted to do some type of aviation, and I didn’t realize they had enlisted aviation jobs as a load master, an engineer. And so I went to the recruiter and I said, hey, I want to enlist, and this is what I want to do. And at that point, I’d taken the Asvap.

07:50
Michael Marotta
I got a favorable score, so began my career with the Air Force, and I got the job I wanted. And so that was super exciting.

08:00
Michael Warren
So what was your job?

08:01
Michael Marotta
I was a loadmaster on C Five, a galaxies for the listeners who aren’t familiar, the C Five, the C being cargo, is the largest aircraft in the United States military. So we did a lot of really heavy lifts. I mean, we could transport an entire unit. We could transport two Ch 53s, we could transport the Navy’s Mark Five special operations boat. We could do some incredible things. And then a lot of time was spent hauling families who are moving from the United States overseas. So we hauled literally pallets of furniture for families moving back and forth. So anything that needed to be transported for the United States military, we did it.

08:49
Michael Warren
And for our listeners, if you ever get the opportunity to be close to one of those, it’s almost like when you see an aircraft carrier in the distance and it looks big, but you don’t understand how large it is until you get right up beside then you’re kind of overwhelmed by its size.

09:05
Michael Marotta
Yeah, it was looking back on my time in the Air Force, and just like, I remember watching people lined up along the runway because they were just like, what is this thing that’s landing? And then people just were so intrigued and fascinated by its sheer size and mass, and it was pretty incredible.

09:27
Michael Warren
And I’m going to throw a shout out to an organization we’re not even affiliated with. But one of the most memorable times that myself and my two youngest sons and my dad had together were went a few years ago to the Air Force Museum at Wright Pat and this huge hangers, talking about a history. I mean, the Air Force just came into being in 1948, and the history that it has and how far we’ve come as an organization, it’s really mind blowing.

10:00
Michael Marotta
Yeah, absolutely. Fly, fight, win. That’s what they always said. It’s like the air superiority that the Air Force continues to have now with the Space Force, they just continue to expand their reach. And it was a total honor to be part of that. And I left a lot of hearing behind because for folks who are familiar, the C Five A, they were Vietnam era aircraft, and they were loud, but incredibly efficient.

10:27
Michael Warren
A little parallel here. One of the things that I don’t think people know are how old some of those Airframes are. Like you talked about, the C Five was a Vietnam era aircraft. The B 52 1st took flight in 1955. It is coming up on 70 years of service, and it’s still operational. I drive around these roads in Michigan. It’s like the aircraft that gets shot at carries a bunch of bombs, can last 70 years. But a road in Michigan needs to be repaved after five. Maybe we need to get those engineers together somehow to get a better product.

11:05
Michael Marotta
Yeah. The Air Force doesn’t go out and buy new planes. The military is like, how can we take the current Airframe and just make some improvements and make it a little better? Which they have since done at Wright Warner Robin in Georgia, they took all the C Five A’s and turned them into C Five Ms. And now they have a bunch of upgrades and they sound like commercial jetliners and yeah, it’s pretty cool.

11:29
Michael Warren
Now, when I was a kid and we lived down there was a road that when you’re going from Macon, Georgia, where I lived, over to one of Robbins, that roadway right there would go right along the edge of Robbins airport space and showing my age, they used to have the F four Phantoms parked along there. And so it used to be F four S and B 52s that were based out of there. The B aaron backstage, they went to Guam. It’s just amazing to me, the aircraft and how much training is involved to keep Air Force personnel up to speed on these things that are constantly changing. I mean, like you said, even if you worked on a C 520 years ago, you’re going to need to be retrained when you go in because there have been so many modifications made to it.

12:17
Michael Marotta
Yeah, it was a constant staying current. They called it being current and it was nonstop. You were flying missions for training. You were flying missions to stay current. And right when you were done with one check ride and you were proficient, they were like, okay, now you got to do this other eval. It was like nonstop because, I mean, the Air Force safety was the number one priority and they just wanted to ensure that everybody was constantly up to date and up to speed.

12:45
Michael Warren
And this is a little bit out of order for our talk, but I think it bears pointing out here that is the type of mindset that I think that we need in law enforcement when it comes to the well being of our people. That constant improvement, that constant readdressing, that constant staying up to speed because unfortunately we have a lot of people that are still where they were when they came into the profession.

13:13
Michael Marotta
And I like that you said that because I spent a lot of time training and spending time with law enforcement, new incoming law enforcement officers, men and women that have been on a number of years. And I always say, like, we are, in my mind, probably the most well vetted profession in order to get the job, like the amount of vetting you have to go through just to even be considered to go through the academy and you go through that process, you go to the academy, and academies are a lot of varying levels. I can tell you at San Antonio, it was rigorous, man. You were not given anything and then you get the job and then you spend time in the FTO program and you do that and then you finally a year later, you’re ready to be on your own. You have a headache every day for two months trying to figure out what’s next.

14:08
Michael Marotta
And then the same man or woman, they’re the best that they’re like. They’re at the tip top shape mentally. They are just ready to go. And five years down the road you see them and it’s like a shell of themselves. And I just often wonder, why are we not doing well there in that space?

14:29
Michael Warren
It’s interesting. In the army they called it PMCs and they were constantly talking about preventative maintenance. And so you would take your weapons out, you take your gear out, and you’d go through all of this work on something that was still working. Okay? It didn’t have any tears. It still functioned. But all this effort was put into preventing bad things from happening, from preventing it from getting worn out. And in retrospect, and they’ve obviously gotten better at it, but in retrospect, we spent so much time on equipment, but we didn’t invest any time like that in preventative maintenance on our people. And it was to our own detriment. To our people’s detriment.

15:11
Michael Marotta
Yeah, 100%. I mean, every year, at least at my agency, went through training every single year, which wasn’t required by the state, but the department liked to stay ahead, above and beyond the training required by the state licensing agency. And I was like, we go through tactics. We take apart our guns. We do all these things. We’re proficient with our firearms. We don’t spend a whole lot of time learning how to be proficient as human beings. And that was a space that I just was like, this is having some really big impacts on our profession.

15:48
Michael Warren
So I guess we’ll go back in time a little bit. Then you get out of the Air Force. What was it that drew you to law enforcement as a career man?

16:00
Michael Marotta
That’s a great question, and I’m going to say something that man for a lot of people. So my father was in SAPD. My father was the reason I didn’t want to be in law enforcement. And interestingly enough, I never considered it as a profession until it was like, all right, I can get out of the military. I’m out processing. What job makes the most sense? Well, law enforcement makes sense. And so you could do that job, you didn’t have to have some kind of advanced degree or training. You just had to have a willingness to serve. And so I went and put in an application. I needed a job. Young husband, young father, and jumped right in, man, both feet.

16:45
Michael Warren
Did you work at the same agency that your dad did?

16:47
Michael Marotta
Yeah, 100%.

16:49
Michael Warren
How was that for you? Because that can be both positive and negative.

16:54
Michael Marotta
Yeah, no, another good question, Mike. Thank you. So my father was really interesting because my father left when I was very young, so I didn’t know my father through some very formative years. I didn’t know him as a teenager, as a young man. I didn’t know him again until I became an adult. But what I can say is, when I got in the department, everybody talked about my father, like, what a great guy he was and the impact that he had on their life and what a good supervisor. And I just remember thinking he didn’t have the same level of impact on me as years went on, I said, that’s so common. That’s such a common storyline for so many of us in law enforcement is how great we show up at work and how not great we are when we take the uniform off and we’re just husbands and fathers and brothers and friends, we don’t do so well at it.

17:47
Brent Hinson
Did you address that or did you internalize it? Because I have to imagine that was frustrating to hear these people talk so glowingly and you maybe didn’t have the same feeling.

18:01
Michael Marotta
I would say initially, probably I didn’t recognize it. It took me a little bit of time, but I certainly didn’t say, well, yeah, well, you don’t know this. I probably internalized that and kept that a little bit to myself and just said, hey, I appreciate that. But as time went on, I knew that there was going to have to be a conversation had at some point because a lot of damage was done. Yeah, I didn’t badmouth them at all.

18:30
Michael Warren
And I don’t know your dad, I’ve never met your dad, but his story isn’t that unique. Unfortunately, in law enforcement, even in many cases, when the dad or the mom, if they stick around, they’re still absent and they may not be physically absent, but what’s the other saying there? Wherever you are, be there. And that often is lacking in our law enforcement professionals.

18:56
Michael Marotta
Yeah, 100%. My father, he’s a good guy. I want to make that very clear. We have a great relationship now by mentioning that.

19:07
Brent Hinson
Not at all. I was just curious.

19:09
Michael Marotta
No way, man. You have to address the elephant in a room. I mean, that’s something that absolutely had to be talked about and something that I did recognize because everybody talked about my father in these loving terms and what a great guy he was. And I was like, Well, I didn’t have the same experience. But you are right, Mike, that as a storyline that I see again and again within this profession is how solid of a job we do at work and how not so good we are at home.

19:38
Michael Warren
And it’s unfortunate because what we do at work is so incredibly important. I mean, it’s an honorable profession, it really is. It’s one of those things where I get onto my kids and they’ll say, well, dad, I didn’t mean to. So I can appreciate that. But the end result is still the same. And if we’re overinvested, even if it’s overinvested in something that is good and worthwhile, if we over invest, it becomes bad.

20:09
Michael Marotta
Something that just came to my mind, as you were saying, that is why we get into the job to begin with. And so, like I said, my father is the reason I didn’t want to become a police officer. But then he was also at the same time the reason that I probably wanted to be a police officer. I think it was probably a little bit more deep rooted, but something that I ask a lot officers is what’s your why, right? Why did you get in this job? Why are you doing what you do? And it’s always very idealistic for so many folks like, oh, well, I want to serve my community. I want to do this good work. Or, when I was a little boy, a police officer walked in and saved the day in something that was happening. And I just loved policemen. But what I found and I’m not a doctor, Reese, nothing, man.

20:55
Michael Marotta
But when you pick apart the layers a little bit more, I found it was stories of abandonment, it was stories of victimization. It was stories of hurt and pain that, on a subconscious level, I feel like drove people to do this very important work. Because law enforcement, as you know, offers so many opportunities for the illusion of power and control. And we talked a little bit about this the other day. It’s like, if I do this job when I wear my uniform I told you my wife used to say, Go put on your costume, right? Because that’s what it was. I put this on and it was like this alternate version of Mike, this version that I didn’t really have to deal with the deeper hurts and pains, because when I was in the uniform, everybody went, oh, Officer, you’re here to fix my problem.

21:42
Michael Marotta
And I kind of became addicted to that as I became addicted to that, which addiction at its core is like avoidant behavior. It gave me more opportunity to avoid the bigger questions like Brent mentioned is, like, having to explore what it was about my father in that relationship that was lacking or that maybe drove me to the profession to begin with. That was a much larger conversation, kind.

22:06
Brent Hinson
Of putting a Band Aid on things just to kind of hold off until things erupt.

22:11
Michael Marotta
Sure.

22:11
Michael Warren
I liked how you use the phrase you peel back the layers, because I think in our profession, a lot of times we try to say, hey, listen, I’m just a knuckle dragger. I just go out and do my job. And the truth is, most of us are very complex creatures with this cauldron of emotions and all these things going on. It really is like we try to bury it. We just don’t want to acknowledge it. Because if we don’t acknowledge it, then we don’t have to address it.

22:41
Michael Marotta
Yeah, 100%. And the other law enforcement, some of the most incredible people I’ve ever met in my life served in law enforcement, like people that were special Forces in the military or that had this doctorate degrees and became police officers and were doing this incredibly important work. Law enforcement introduced me to a wide variety of people coming to the job for a wide variety of reasons. But what I can say, some of the most incredible human beings I’ve ever known and continue to know there will be my lifelong friends are our police officers and our first responders, just some amazing people.

23:20
Michael Warren
I also want to talk about how you labeled it as an addiction because that’s what it really comes down to. And that was a class that I used to teach. And I would ask people, I said, okay, I want you to do this for me. I want you to sit down, and you shouldn’t have to think about this. I want you to list the three most important things in your life in a list. And I always make a joke, hey, listen, if you’re having to think about it, that’s a bigger problem we got to talk about someplace else. And you go around the room and you ask people, what would you list? And universally, god, family, country, family, health, work, whatever, all these things going back and forth, and people are in a good mood. And I said, okay, and I throw up a picture of a calendar survivor come follow you around for a week.

24:08
Michael Warren
Would the way that you invest your time reflect those priorities that you just wrote down? And it gets as quiet as it can because what we say is not reflected in what we do?

24:21
Michael Marotta
Yeah, that’s deep, because you’re right. If I ask people and I used to do that at in service training, and people always say but I’m like, is that actually the law of priority? Like, is that actually what’s important to you? And usually what I saw and maybe you saw this, too, Mike, is when I asked them to write their list, it was like, yeah, God, family, work, whatever. And they went down the list, right. And I was like, okay, I bet if you flip that list around, what’s at the bottom is actually where most of your time is going. And it almost always was.

24:53
Brent Hinson
I wrote something down yesterday. You’ll be proud of me, Mike. I wrote a quote down your direction, not your intentions. Determine your destination.

25:03
Michael Warren
That’s awesome. But it’s so true. And that’s why I like the word addiction, because if you talk to a drug addict and you ask them what’s most important in your life, they’ll talk about their kids or they’ll talk about their family or they’ll talk about whatever it is. The truth is it’s whatever they’re addicted to. And that’s why I love that analogy of the job being an addiction, because there are a lot of good things that happen on the job.

25:33
Michael Marotta
Yeah, 100%. There’s a lot of great things that happen on the job, but law enforcement and just all the different opportunities to make money and side hustles you can do also offers a really convenient opportunity to avoid life and avoid having to deal with some of the bigger issues going on. And again, the illusion of power and control that I feel being a law enforcement officer offers, it’s an illusion.

26:01
Michael Warren
When I was a kid, my parents worked at a children’s home down in Mission texas. So I lived in a cottage, and we lived in a boys cottage. And there were anywhere between ten and 13 boys that would be a part of this cottage. I mean, talking about distractions from life, distractions from homework, because it was always somebody to play with, somebody was always wanting to play football or baseball, and those things are good, but it caused me to neglect some things that were needed in life. And the side hustles, the overtime, the late calls, the answering the phone when you’re in the middle of a family event and getting called in while they’re good, they do give you reason not to be where you are.

26:44
Michael Marotta
Yeah. Totally not present. And I’m familiar working in the wellness and resiliency space with the department also. Right. I remember thinking, well, this is my passion, this is my life’s work. This is what I’m literally supposed to be doing because I’m boots on the ground, helping officers navigate difficulties in their life. Again, I wasn’t navigating the difficulties in my own life. Well, we’re sitting there having dinner and the phone rang. I had zero boundaries. Again, addictive quality is my lack of boundaries, my inability to say no and say, I’m not going to do that. I wasn’t kind to my family, but more importantly, I wasn’t being kind to myself. In those moments, I had no boundaries. For me, the assumption was, if I do this thing and I do it well, somehow somebody’s going to give me that pat on the back that’s going to finally confirm that I’m good enough.

27:39
Michael Warren
It really is. It’s like a druggie that’s looking for the next tie. Well, the next one’s going to be the one that satisfies all these wants and needs that I have, and then we get that there’s going to be another one, and we fail to recognize it’s never going to end and it’s never going to be enough.

27:58
Michael Marotta
Yeah. And then also, Mike, recognizing that there’s addictions that go beyond substances. Now, I think we all know within the first responder cultures, police, fire, there is a huge propensity for alcoholism, for addictive behaviors, but addictions go beyond substances. So a part of my work with the department was working with officers that were struggling with alcohol. I probably took upwards of 2025 officers to treatment. It was a population that I loved and understood, although I had never been addicted to a substance. What people used to ask me was, well, then how do you know? And I’m like, because my addiction was rage. My addiction was anger. I’m a rageaholic in recovery, man. That was my drug of choice. If I wasn’t angry, if I wasn’t physically mad at something, it was like I didn’t know how to live. I didn’t know how to be in a space where I wasn’t angry and enraged and blaming something, some circumstance, someone, for all the anger that I was unable to deal with.

29:08
Michael Marotta
So for me. It was an addiction. It was an escape for me.

29:12
Michael Warren
I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you this here. What point, what was going on that caused you to say, hey, you know what? I need to become more involved on the wellness side of things. Most people talk about that there was something that happened that’s like, you know what? You got to get this fixed.

29:32
Michael Marotta
Yeah. So I’m blessed. I’ve been married for 23 years. I have two sons, 22 and twelve, which I probably should have mentioned at the top end because they are the pride of my life, especially my wife. By the grace of god, I continue to remain married today post law enforcement. But it was 2019. That was 19 years into our marriage. Our marriage, our family structure hit rock bottom. And people say rock bottom, everybody’s. Rock bottom is a little bit different. But in this home, that was it. We knew I had a choice. I could do what I always did and blame and say, well, it was this thing. Here’s the actual reason. Or I could take a step back and look at who is the common denominator here. Michael Maroda is the common denominator in all of this, and this has got to stop. So the possibility that I might lose the people that I love the most was when I said, okay, I got to do something different.

30:39
Michael Marotta
And I didn’t just jump into wellness. I didn’t go, hey, my marriage is at the rock bottom. Maybe I should do wellness. That wasn’t what happened. It was this kind of progressive, like, okay, first I need to fix this relationship. So how do I fix this relationship? Well, I got to fix me, and I got to heal little Mike. I got to heal teenage Mike. I got to heal all these different versions of Mike, walk through that and heal those guys. And then the adult who I had become is going to be able to begin to heal the relationship with my wife. And so that’s what I did. And about that time, 2020, COVID hit, which COVID was a total blessing for my wife and I and my family. But in law enforcement, there was this huge, very palpable shift in mindset, and you could just feel it nationwide.

31:28
Michael Marotta
It wasn’t just in San Antonio. It felt like there was a struggle. And so we’re on the mental health unit. Good buddy of mine, Joe smarrow, with solution point plus. He has since left the department. Wonderful human being. He wanted to do a wellness class on the six pillars of wellness. Quite frankly, he approached the staff and said, hey, we want to teach this class. We were told it didn’t fit within the training requirements for the year. And so we said, fantastic, we’re going to teach it anyways. Yeah, that’s what you do, right? Because people needed to hear this. And as I shared the six pillars, I shared my story as well, because I wanted to get from behind the shroud of fear of sharing my story. And this idea that being vulnerable creates connectedness with the people. They need to hear this story. They need to hear the brokenness in order to hear the victory.

32:23
Michael Marotta
And so that’s what I did. And then every week I did that for a year. These men and women would stay after class and they wanted to visit. Like, hey. It was almost like a whisper of shame. Like, hey, I’m going through something real similar. You think we could talk about it? Yeah, let’s talk about it. And so I started to build trust, and it started off as a trickle. And then before you knew it, man, the faucet was open. It was several hundred officers that were coming to me. And as you can imagine, I’m one person trying to manage all this, trying to find resources and network and build a network of clinicians, alcohol, treatment. It was daunting work. But that’s where it really started, was the demise of my marriage and my relationship with my children. Because our adult son, I love him.

33:13
Michael Marotta
He’ll tell you, Man, dad, he reminds me every chance he gets in a loving way, you are so different with me than you were with faith, than you are with and I’m like, Man, I know. And I will spend the rest of my life trying to write those messages that I left, those negative core beliefs.

33:30
Michael Warren
I have to give some props here to my co host. So often we hear stories about parents that fail to recognize how limited our time is with our kids and how important that time is until they’re on their third or fourth kid. And by that time, they say, like you said, they’re so much different. But my co host is one of the most involved, supportive, fantastic fathers that I’ve ever been privileged to know. A guy that is not only proud of his son, but is also a part of his son. I love getting on when we talk. I love hearing the stories of Xavier because I feel like I’m living through him. And then there was a video that was posted of them doing a song. And it’s just like, man, how much better would we as professionals be? How much better would we as a country be if we learn that early rather than after a couple of failed attempts at being a dad or being a mom?

34:35
Brent Hinson
Thank you for that. I didn’t know you’re going to make me cry. Part of that and reason why I was excited to have you on here, Mikey, is because I have a similar story. And it boils down to priorities. I was in a job, a very stressful job. It was driving me nuts. Driving me crazy. And I made the decision to walk away, left all these things I had because I wasn’t being the dad I wanted to be. So there’s something to that. Your mental health, your state of enjoying life, that’s so much more important than a job you’re going to do for 30 years and then you’re done.

35:14
Michael Marotta
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for saying that. It’s the truth. I mean, I was at a point in my career because people ask me, like, why did you leave at year 16? I didn’t retire. I resigned. And it’s a long story, Mike, and we talked a little bit about it, but values, my values, the values outside the door of the department were no longer the values that I saw being lived out by the greater whole within the department. And that was a struggle for me, because here I was on this transformative journey, really redefined my values and how I lived, and it didn’t align. And there is no amount of money in the world. There’s no amount of bought vacation time and retirement checks that can replace me here now with my sons and how they experience me and how they feel loved by me. I had to go.

36:14
Michael Marotta
I need to spend more time with the kids. I needed to get back and make my wife a priority. Like, I needed to fix things. And there was a dramatic shift, and leaving was not an easy decision. It was not an emotional decision, I can tell you that. But I was left with this big question of, like, because I’m a spiritual guy, what is God trying to tell me here? What’s going on? There’s this other shift within the growth journey. What was there still for me to learn? And I had to remove take myself out of the profession in order to allow that process to continue to happen.

36:52
Michael Warren
I like watching athletics. I like watching sports. It is always heartwarming to me when I see a professional athlete who’s making Aaron Bevel kind of money, right? And they decide, you know what? This is costing me too much time away from my family. And they walk away. No amount of money, like you just said, is going to replace the time that I have with my family. I don’t want them to look back and always say, well, you remember that trip? Oh, no, that’s right, you weren’t there. You remember that time? That’s right, you weren’t there. And it’s a struggle, though. Bryn will tell you this. I struggle with this. I feel that what I do brings value to the profession and then vicariously brings value to our community and to our country. There are times where I have to evaluate, am I gone too much?

37:46
Michael Warren
What’s the negative impact it’s having on my little immediate community? You said it earlier. You said you had to take a step back and evaluate what was going on. It’s hard to take that step back.

37:59
Michael Marotta
Yeah, because when you take the step back, you have to relinquish control, and sometimes you don’t have any power over the process or the outcome. That’s a scary place to be for law enforcement officers when you’ve been taught how to maintain control of everything for everybody. I had to take a big step back and just kind of take that 50,000 foot view and look at what needed to be fixed. And did it fit within the context of my career? And the answer was, no, it no longer fit.

38:33
Michael Warren
It’s amazing to me how we I say we I’m talking about the profession. We encourage our people to think deeply and to think critically and all these things when they’re evaluating problems, when they’re trying to come up with solutions for the problem. Man, I tell you, I think that perhaps the biggest addiction in this profession is the addiction to control people. We laugh about control freaks and micromanagers and all that type of stuff. It’s unfortunate, but some of the most successful people in this profession were control freaks and micromanagers, and it’s because they were able to utilize that control better than most others.

39:14
Michael Marotta
Yeah, I never considered myself a controlling person until after I left the job and I saw truly what a control freak I had become. And that honestly, like I said earlier, man, it wasn’t real. That wasn’t a real thing. I actually had zero control. I had power over nothing.

39:34
Michael Warren
It’s discouraging when you come to that realization. I spent that entire time building this mirage.

39:42
Michael Marotta
Yeah, but my wife and I were talking she’s going through a 14 week program at church and they’re going through a book, and were talking about this idea of power and how as human beings, power and control comes in the form of blaming people and circumstances and things. And I told her, Isn’t it interesting that you can have the same level of power and control by taking responsibility for your own actions? But why is that not what we want to do? Why is that like, we are so much less willing to accept power and control through ourselves and just constantly trying to maintain it through you did this and you made me this. And it’s like, wait a second. I could take responsibility and have power and control over myself. Now. That’s something I can do.

40:32
Brent Hinson
Let me ask you this real quick, because I was able to walk away from a job. You were able to walk away from a job. There are going to be people listening right now that they don’t have the luxury to walk away, but they still need to make a change in their life. Something needs to change. What can they do? Where can they start?

40:51
Michael Marotta
Man, that is a great question. And my answer to that would be start inside your home. Whatever your support system is, you need to start having some vulnerable conversations. How can I shore some of these things up in my own personal life? Have discussions with the children, have discussions with your spouse or your significant other or whoever occupies space in your life, I think that’s a great place to start. Even if you don’t have the outward, like, there’s not problems and things aren’t falling apart, it’s still a great place is like, hey, let’s sit down and have a discussion about what does our future look like? What does it look like if we start dreaming together now about what life looks like post law enforcement. But I think for me, start within your own homes, because I get asked that quite a bit. Where should I start?

41:44
Michael Marotta
I’m like, start within your home and start within yourself. That’s another big piece of this, is like, start digging into who you are and go back and spend time and heal some of those other versions of you, because we all have multiple versions of ourselves. Go back and reassure them that they’re safe and they’re okay and that they didn’t get it right. And a little self compassion goes a long way. So that’s where I would start. Let me start in my own home. Let me start on myself.

42:14
Michael Warren
I’ve talked about this book before on this podcast, lead Yourself First by Raymond Kethledge. He talks about in there that especially in society today, we never have time to sit down and truly reflect and think deeply. And he advocates for regular scheduled time of solitude for the purposes of deep thinking, because we never do that. I think that’s required for that step back, that reflection on thinking big picture. And it’s like society is doing everything they possibly can to keep us from having those times.

42:53
Michael Marotta
Yeah, I love that. And being willing to step out into the unknown and the possibility that there’s going to be fear. So you may have to take a risk. Self growth, and it’s a risk. Absolutely. And it can be a scary place to because there’s a lot of unknowns. If I go and ask my partner, hey, I wanted to talk about how I can improve as a husband or as a father, there’s a little bit of fear with what might follow that question. And you got to be willing to sit in that and spend a little time with it and understand that this is a vibration of feeling that I’m having going through my body. I’m going to accept it. I’m going to welcome it, I’m going to know it when it comes in. I’m going to invite it and spend time with it. But I’m also going to see how I can have it occupy space within me a little bit less.

43:45
Michael Marotta
And how you do that is sit down and be compassionate with yourself.

43:50
Brent Hinson
One time I had a therapist that I was talking to, and she said, you need to be vulnerable. And I said, I don’t like that word. I don’t like that. There’s part of your problem. Yeah. There’s a moment of clarity for me there.

44:03
Michael Marotta
Yeah.

44:04
Michael Warren
Just as society and we’re thinking talking bigger picture here, I think one of the most beneficial things that we could do would be reframing what we define as success, how we define a successful person. It seems like society everything’s about metrics. How many followers do you have? How many subscribers do you have? How much money do you have? What rank do you hold? Those type things right there. I guarantee you that in ten years, when we go and we talk to Brent’s family, they’re going to define him as a success because of how he handled himself and behaved as a husband and as a dad. And the truth of the matter is, there’s old saying that the best thing that a dad can do for his kids is to love their mother. And by doing that now, we’re reaching generational impact, and it’s just a reframing of the whole success thing.

45:07
Michael Warren
As you stepped out because you walked away from the police department, there had to be some uncertainty. But based upon what your son is saying about you now, we have to define that decision as a success. You may not be where you want to be, but so far it’s been pretty dag on successful.

45:29
Michael Marotta
Oh, my God. And I think Harvard, if I’m not mistaken, still has that longitudinal study about defining happiness. And it’s funny that they need this 50 year longitudinal study, but what determines happiness and longevity? Relationships, it’s directly correlated, like, what are the quality of your relationships? How are you loving and how are you being loved? Because ultimately, it’s going to decide your longevity, your happiness. It’s going to give you long term joy and sustainability over time, because law enforcement is a drop in time. There’s so much life before and after these career fields.

46:10
Michael Warren
But I think that’s the problem with an addiction, because addiction is about happiness, and we think that’s the be all, end all, when the truth of the matter is it’s joy, and joy is lasting and it’s long term and it’s deeper, but it requires a little bit of work. It’s not a one hitter. I think that the work that you’re doing with first helping people drive towards that as a goal rather than that short term happiness, that short term fix that we get oftentimes through our job.

46:45
Michael Marotta
Oh, man, it’s my favorite thing to be in a room of cops, just ten cops, a dozen cops maybe, and just have open, honest, vulnerable conversations and to see their perspectives change, like, right in front of you. And at the end of a four hour class, they come to you and they say, I’ve never heard anybody speak like that or talk about things from that perspective, man, that’s everything to me. And it continues to guide me on my healing journey, because this journey, man, it will never end. It’s a lifelong journey. Self improvement doesn’t just stop. I’m never going to arrive. I love that there’s always going to be more work to do. And if I’ve ever I feel complacent or like, hey, this feels pretty good. I know I got to lean in a little bit more, dig a little bit deeper, and figure out what things need to be fixed.

47:35
Michael Warren
If somebody were to find themselves right now in the position that you were when you started this journey and they were looking for some help, where are some places that are resources? Where can they find information on First Help?

47:49
Michael Marotta
They can go to our website. That’s the number first LP.org. They can go to our website. They can see what kind of trainings we offer. They can take a look at our national database of suicide data collection. The organization was founded by Karen Solomon in 2016 and the only organization capturing these metrics year over year successfully. I think that’s a great place to go. We have a resource page, firsthelp net as well, which we’re in the process of kind of rebuilding that out. I also encourage people to find me personally. Am I allowed to give, like, my number out? Can I do that or no, do.

48:31
Brent Hinson
Whatever you want to do, buddy. If you’re fine with it, we’re good with it.

48:34
Michael Marotta
Yeah. I really don’t mind, because I know the folks listening to this podcast are people that I know and love, and my phone number is 210-347-8008. I encourage people, like, they’re really exploring this, leaving their career, or how to do it. Give me a call and I’ll be as open, raw, and vulnerable as possible with them. And I’m not encouraging people tomorrow give up their jobs at all. But what I am encouraging people is to know when to say when. Know when it’s your time. Kevin Gilmartin talks in his book Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement how two years is always the magic number, because two years feels long enough away that it’s still in the distance, but it’s also close enough that it seems reasonable. So you’ll hear and I hear it all the time I’m going to do two more years, and then I’m going to do this thing in two more years.

49:29
Michael Marotta
Then I’ll be vested in the pension. Great. Know when it’s time to hang it up. And I had a therapist tell me one time, if you had six months to complete your ten year goals, how would you do that? Write it down and come back to me with your plan. And I was like, well, that’s kind of a scary thing, because everyone assumes we all have goals and timelines and time frames. But what if it’s right now? What if you’re in it and you just don’t recognize it? Anything’s possible if you just spend a little time with it and you have the support of the people you love.

50:01
Michael Warren
Mikey, as we wrap things up, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your vulnerability, because modeling that type of behavior, I think is one of the most impactful things that someone can do because once you hear somebody else doing it, now it’s not so strange. It’s not like Brent, but I don’t like that word. But at least if somebody else is doing it’s not so peculiar.

50:26
Brent Hinson
Right.

50:28
Michael Warren
So I appreciate you doing that. The training that you’re providing through Firsthelp, I think is invaluable. We are huge supporters of the organization here and I might as well throw this out. The need doesn’t stop. Okay. First help is run through donations from people like us. I cannot encourage you enough to support this organization. They put their money and their time where their mouth is. It’s meaningful work. So please consider supporting them. Thank you so much, man, for agreeing to be here. Thanks for sharing your story with us, because every time I hear something like this, it just reminds me, you got to do a better job. Got to do a better job. And it’s good to be reminded.

51:12
Michael Marotta
No, I appreciate you all having me on. It was such a pleasure. I feel like we just scratched the surface. There’s so many different directions, but I hope somebody out there who’s considering this or needs to improve some part of their area of their life, like, I encourage them reach out to me, go to our website, find someone and do something. Sitting by and picking up the bottle is not the answer. Be willing to be vulnerable. Absolutely.

51:42
Michael Warren
These conversations are never easy, but that doesn’t take away from their meaning. And I think my biggest takeaway from our talk today, don’t two year your life away.

51:55
Brent Hinson
Like I said at the beginning, we are going to talk specifically about law enforcement, but this applies to everybody and if it applies to you, find help. We’ll put resources in the show notes. We will put a link to first help in the show notes. And again, those donations go a long way for that organization. So definitely reach out to them and you’ll find all that on our website, between the Lines with virtualacademy.com. Mikey, thank you so much for being vulnerable with us today and telling your story because it will help someone who is listening right now.

52:26
Michael Marotta
Yeah. I appreciate you guys and thank you all for the good work you do. And thank you to the audience and those that serve and continue to serve. You’re in my prayers and hope the best.