Angela, why don't you share about your background and why you're so passionate about suicide prevention?

Thanks, Sue.

So, as Sue said, I'm Angela Crawford, and I am the Executive Director of Construction Suicide Prevention, Inc., which is the organization that is responsible for Construction Suicide Prevention Week in September, the founding organization of that initiative.

And I come to that role in kind of an interesting way.

I also work, as Sue mentioned, as the vice president for the builders over membership and marketing.

And the builders was one of the founding members of this initiative.

And as the initiative grew and became something that was so much greater than we could handle as volunteer responsibilities from the builders.

And then Kara can continue on with telling us about some of the events that are happening this year since she's chair for this particular year.

What has that been for you? The sort of, like, process as well.

Look, the transition has not been easy.

Um, you know, in my personal life everything went to shit.

It turned upside down.

Um, you know, since leaving the Navy I had a marriage breakdown, became a full-time single mom.

We went through DV court.

We're currently in family court for three years, and somewhere in between that I just thought, "Why not start a business?" Uh, I had never had any inclination to start a business.

Yeah.

Wow.

The idea with EMDR is that trauma is held in our body in a different way than normal memories.

It doesn't seem to go as deeply into the hippocampus, which is where we build a narrative that helps us kind of make sense.

Even though I was just talking about not hanging on to your story, we still need sometimes a narrative to make sense of what's happening.

And what happens with trauma is sometimes it's stored in fragments where we couldn't make sense of it.

It overwhelmed our nervous system.

And so it's stored in pieces, like there might be images, there might be thoughts, there might be feelings, but they're not integrated.

Like they go offline or?

So, because you had a change of career throughout this as well, right?

Yes, I had a big change of career.

I was in the Navy for 18 years, almost our entire relationship, funnily enough.

I left that.

I was studying.

I was doing a double diploma of HR and business management.

I was being full-time mum, wifey, marriage breakdown.

little things like I don't know what flavor giant bucket of ice cream should I eat tonight or you know red wine or white wine or whatever and working bigger like should I start this business but um but clearly you have very supportive friends too who said yes that's a great idea