What Strong Looks Like After the Hard Stuff

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From others over self, it's Hardcore and At Ease, a show about people who are keeping their edge without going over the edge. I'm host Shelly Rood. The hardest investigation most high performers never open is the one on ourselves. Well, today's guest did, and what she found gave her 38 years of marriage and a peace that doesn't require perfect circumstances. So it's time to think differently. She's an Army CID special agent, a law enforcement executive, and a parent of two sons deployed to Afghanistan. We explore how she stayed whole when she had been exposed to everything broken. This is Hardcore and At Ease. Before we get into today's conversation, I want to take a moment to thank you specifically. You, thank you for making the choice to be here. Time is the most precious resource that we have, and you're gifting yours to me today. I promise in turn to honor that gift with an episode that brings real value to your life and to the lives of those you love. Today I have a special shout out to Kyle Russell. He's a listener of this show and also commanding officer of Air Station Detroit, United States Coast Guard. Kyle, thank you for your service and for being part of the Others Over Self community. To your crew, we wish you safe skies and safe water today and every day forward. Now let's kick off today's episode with a question that people in our world really aren't asking out loud. When is the last time any of us opened a case on ourselves? Leaders like us investigate everything: the mission, the team, the problem that's in front of us, but our own file, the one that lives between the ears. It has everything that we've seen and done, lost and kept moving from. I truly believe that most of us have never opened it. We tend to pack it into a rucksack and just keep marching. Dinah Durham went into the Military Police Corps and she came out a CID special agent. In her words, her office had purview over everything that was on a felony level that had to do with the military. From procurement to fraud, death and murder. At one time, she was the only female agent in an office of about 20 guys. At her last position before she retired, chief executive of a law enforcement agency. She's the daughter of a veteran, a veteran herself, married to a veteran, and a mother of veterans. Dinah has been inside some of the hardest terrain a person can walk, and she will tell you the investigation that she avoided the longest was the one on herself. This is what we're about to explore today, so let's get into it.

Oh, D does a lot of things, and if I had looked forward in my life, I would have never predicted I would be where I'm at. This was not a plan, but you know, I make my plans and God directs the watercourse. So Dina is first of all a daughter of the Most High King. My faith is the foundation now It has not always been of who I am and what I do. I have experience as the daughter of a veteran. I have been a veteran. I married a veteran, and our son is still serving. So I think that the fact that the love for country and the desire to serve our nation is interwoven greatly in who I am. But all of that experience and exposure has also given me a heart for veterans, especially female veterans, and then the wives of veterans and what they go through in the coming and going and the change and the move and raising what we call third culture kids. Because, you know, every time you move, you got to adapt to a new culture. And lastly, just for mothers of veterans, you know, it's one thing to send your husband to deploy. It's a whole different issue when your son, you your sons. And I had that experience in 2019 when both of our sons were sent to Afghanistan, and that was a very interesting year for me. So that, that has informed myself now. And in doing that, there's a lot of empathy overload sometimes when you're trying to relate to other people. So you've got to learn how to be present but not be there. So I think if a woman veteran came in, I'd want to know about her, about her experience, where she's been, what she's seen, what is her heart, what hurts her heart, or what's heavy in her heart. Because we carry lots of things that we don't even realize we carry, just because we're used to throwing things in our rucksack, you know, just one more thing, let's deal with today, because we do what we have to do. That's what we've been called to do. So there's a lot of things there. I think as a child, I have probably more empathy with the continually moving. I think it also has given me a love for international things, that everybody's diverse and different, and to try to go into that differentness and love that, but realizing we all have a value. We all need to know that we're seen, known, and loved.

Well, you mentioned that you have a deep service-driven passion Where does that come from? Because not everybody has that.

I would have to say it's probably my upbringing, my parents. I mean, my dad was very into serving, but I'm not sure that some of it's not just natural nature. You know, some people are just more— even as a kid, I would see people in need and feel this desire to help them. Little old ladies having problems getting through the door, or somebody needing carrying things, or just that Even the, maybe because I was the kid that moved a lot and had to adjust also, the new kid in the classroom, I kind of felt that need to try to help them adjust into the new world that they were stepping into.

So chronologically, you came out of high school, was going into police work your first attempt at having a real job, or what did that look like for you?

So I went to college, and I was in the middle of college, and I was poor,, and I saw an ad for, uh, a police officer in the community I was going to college in, in Kansas. And, um, I thought, well, I'm in pretty good shape, I'll go try this out. So at 21, I got hired to work the street. I did that for about 3 and a half years until I married my husband.

Stop it. Can I just pause you? Because for most 21-year-old women in shape who need money in college, there's another type of working the street that they would be attracted to. Exactly.

And again, it goes back to this. I saw all these kids, I saw all these juveniles just struggling to and getting into things that they shouldn't have. And I was like, okay, can I make a difference? I, I can make a difference. I, I have the world by the tail. I could do this. That's that ideally ideology, confident that my ideals would work.

I—

that was a good education because I might have been able to impact a few people's lives, but I wasn't going to change the world. Impact one or two, yes, maybe. But so yeah, that was it.

So you went, I think, into police work?

Yeah, I did that for about 3 and a half years, and then I married my husband, and he was like— we were like, okay, we're gonna be, you know, sent here or there. And I was like, well, what am I gonna do? I wasn't designed just to be the wife. I needed to have a purpose. I needed— I was driven. I was always driven. I went to college and, and worked full-time, so I— there couldn't be this empty space. And so I thought, well, okay, I'll go join the Army, and there will be sent around the world together, you know, this romantic ideal. And we spent, of the first 4 years married, 10 months in the exact same place. That was— and I look back and I— the fact that we are still married, about to celebrate 38 years, is God's grace, because those were never easy years. If I wasn't deployed, he was deployed, or if we weren't— one of us wasn't at school, the other one was at school. So it was good. Our son was born in, um, late '92, and by the spring of '93, I was on my way out.

So how many years did you serve in the military?

So I turned around, I actually did an 8-year contract, but I did 5 and a half on active duty and then the last part of it in the National Guard Reserve.

Can you share a little bit deeper of your story of what it was like to be both a service member and to be the spouse of a service member? That is a life situation that I have in common with you. I am divorced from my ex-husband, but I spent a solid decade right there in my uniform alongside my husband who is also in uniform. And that's a very interesting dynamic, and there's a lot of push and pull that comes in that season of time. I know that we have a listener who's in that season and, and she wants to learn more about how do I make this work, right? How do I get to that? How many years did you say? 36?

Almost 38, actually. But yeah, yeah, that's a hard balance because you've got your own career and your own demands. And of course, those first years you're seeking success and you're trying to prove that you're capable. And you know this, Shelly, you're the minority in a male world and there's always— you feel like a cog, an O in a world of Xs, that you're trying to prove that you're just as capable and able and everything. And then you're trying to support your husband and there's this— how do you connect? How do you keep connected? And it's incredibly hard. And I will tell you, we did not do well at it. Communication is key. Being able to have that communication connection, it's almost like that if you could have 10 minutes a day just to talk about not what needs to be done or the bills or any of that, but just talk about what's going on with you. I think that connection's better. We live in an age where that's a lot easier now. When I was— it was when you were international, somebody had to call through AT&T to the local base and then they had to dial your home number and hope somebody was there. And there were a lot of times, like I was deployed during Desert Storm. There's a lot of times when I would call and just leave messages on the message machine because of what Lee was doing. So it's trying, but I think it's a choice. You have to commit to the choice. And if the other person isn't willing, unfortunately it falls apart. And there's a lot of fallout, there's a lot of hurt, there's a lot of grief and pain. But chasing the next best thing isn't always easier either, 'cause you've still got all that grief and pain you've got to work through.

You do. And it's not just a choice you make once, right? I mean, that lifestyle is multiple deployments, like you said, and multiple hellos and multiple goodbyes. And it's a choice that you have to wake up every single day and say, "I choose you, and we're gonna make this communication happen." And I wonder, I do wonder about our current military couples and the frequency of communication. Is it helping or hurting? Because I also feel like the quality of communication is going down. You know, like when you get to talk and be with somebody all the time, you kind of like, it's not special anymore.

No, and when you look back at the letters that were written during the Civil War or the First World War or even the Vietnam War home, the expression and the feelings and the sharing— no, they didn't get to talk regularly, but there was such deepness in it. And I think you have a great point that sometimes when it could be casual, you forget that connection. And that, that need to be vulnerable and honest, I think we struggle with that in society anyway. Women are much better, but we're not great at having at least a small circle that we can kind of be authentic with.

But well, let's get this straight too, right? Because so at this point in your life, you're a former police officer, and then I don't even think we even talked about what your job was in the military. So what is that?

I went into the Military Police Corps and I came out as a CID special agent. So basically we had her view over everything that was on a felony level that had to do with the military, from procurement to fraud to death to murder, you name it. Everybody had to be— everybody that died in theater or in a military-related had to be documented.

So definitely not an open, loving, vulnerable kind of community where you walk into work and hold hands and share feelings. Oh no, no, no.

Because at one time I was the only agent female in the office of about 20 guys. So, you know, I had to learn how to adjust to the fact that, oh, when it's stressful, let's be sarcastic and rude because that's how we deal with our emotions. We can't say, oh, this really is horrible, or cry about it, you know, not that some of them couldn't be vulnerable, especially when it came to children. I mean, just watching them deal with the loss of a child somewhere and somehow. But most of it was just crass, very crass.

And you're in your formative years here, right? I mean, we're talking about 20s for the most part, into the 30s.

Yeah, yeah. So that all started a lot of— I mean, as I look back over and I see the healing that God's done in how what I was exposed to, how it actually did some pretty deep wounds that I didn't even realize. And then how he's healed— pulled me out of that and healed and give me a different perspective of— because when you deal in that world of law enforcement, you deal with everybody's uglies. Nobody wants to see you when they're happy. They're having a problem, and that's why you're there.

So what are some examples of some calls that you would be on or some altercations? You know, what would a day in the life look like?

As a street officer, my very first call with my FTO was a suicide. And I would say that I really think they thought they were gonna make me sick and I would quit. But that only— as you read from my bio, I was competitive, I was strong-headed. That was the last thing they were going to do. That only made me mad to prove that I was going to make it. So, you know, just dealing with the families of that, I remember very clearly, you know, I was all of 100 and 15 pounds, probably a little more with a gun belt on. We got called to a domestic and the guy was on PCP acid and she had him locked outside the door. And so we're trying to talk to him on the front porch and you're, you're talking to him. We think we're calming him down. We're going to flip around and kind of arrest him, take him and everything. There's— I actually have a partner this time and she opens the front door. We have him leaned against the front door and the 3 of us go rolling into the living room and my partner's on the bottom and the guy's going for his gun. Luckily, our sergeant had felt like he needed to show up and the joke was always, where I come in, Dida's just clubbing him with the club because she's like, we're not going down, we're not dying this round. This is not our day. And then I think there were 4 of us that ended up having to wrestle him to arrest him because he was— he wasn't feeling any pain. At all, none. So that was a little scary. There's, you know, there's all kinds of things when you do arrests for DUIs. My fellow officers could get in a fight with anybody. And if I just said, "How would your mom feel?" Or, "What are you doing? What was your decision?" They'd be in tears. "Take me, I need to go get help. I've been drinking too much," whatever it is. So it was just really interesting to see how females related to the situation versus, males. So just, just a sum of the few things that, especially as an early police officer, when I got to the CID office, a lot of that's still ViCAP murders where you'd have a murder in your area and you were trying to relate it to other incidents because that— it's called a violent crimes indicators. And so if you could put all the specifics into that crime into the system, it might alert to something else where that person had been previous. And when you have military guys that move around, not all of them are nice guys, not all of them are nice girls. So they're leaving a wave of damage where they've been.

That is so interesting. I was talking with some of my mentors who are not military about the true traditions and the true culture that exists within military culture. And an analogy that I use is the difference between Iron Man and Captain America. And how Iron Man tends to be pretty loose in his values, but yet he's celebrated because of what he provides from a protection standpoint. And then you've got Captain America who has really strong set of values and in some ways is not celebrated quite as much. And my take on it is that there's a lot more Iron Mans than there is Captain Americas. But I know I was Army, and so I feel like I, you know, I might be a little swayed there one way. What, how do you feel about that analogy?

I know I think that we have this noetic sin and no matter what we do and that it's the culture you live in. If you live in a military culture that values integrity and, and care and consideration, that you're going to see that. If you live in a culture and each little unit has its culture that changes with each command climate, you're going to see less of that. It's from— is that unit where the uniform's pressed and looks good and everything, or is it they overlook that? And we don't care if you're sloppy, and we don't care if you do sloppy work. I think it's that environment that's set. Now, in saying that, there are some people that are just bent on evil from whatever they come from, whatever they were exposed to, whatever is in their inner being, that you're going to see that. But in your high-strat units where power is, or that ethos, that warrior ethos is existent, unless somebody regulates that with honor and integrity and the value of human life, it can really go rogue.

Now tell me about the different types of units that you've been a part of, because you had an 8-year military career, both active duty and reserve. Was there major differences that you saw across the different branch?

Because you only do the, the reserve part once a month, and I was assigned to a CID unit then, and so they were mostly old, older guys that had been in or gotten out that were either police officers or, or corrections officers or doing something in that field. They were pretty professional for the most part, but I never I never felt like I really fit because they'd been together for years and I was kind of the new kid coming off of active duty and they hadn't been on active duty for quite a few years, if at all. You know, we're going back a lot of years. I think all in all it was pretty professional, but it wasn't that cohesiveness that you have when you're working with somebody every single day, you know, when you're in, you know, this active duty or you're working full time with those people. How you understand how they think and you have this, you start having more of the same values. And again, it's, it's a, it, the climate is set by the command, how those, what those values are going to be, which is true of anything you lead. I'm sure you, with the many women you talk to that are leading agencies, you set that climate.

They do. And unfortunately, right, not like you said, not every commander is a good commander. They might think that they are, But a lot of people carry a lot of trauma and baggage that they have not even recognized in their own lives, so they can't even see the effect that it's having on other people.

Yeah, this is all they've known. They've never known that there's a freer way, there's a victorious way to live. And that's, that's the beauty of the organization like Warriors Set Free. It helps you realize this is broken in me, or I'm battle-worn, and I need help. And there's victory in that. There's a way to walk out of that.

Can you share with me a little bit about what happened after the service? I've got my uniform still in my drawer. It's been years, but it's still there. So like, who did you become when it was time to hang that up?

I became confused. I mean, I just— because that's your identity. And as I transitioned, I went back to law enforcement when I came off of active duty, but I did a financial fraud job, which was calmer. Not as demanding in, in time and mental energy, which was probably a good transition. But there was a lot of struggle with who am I, how do I fit in this world I find? Because even going back to a field I knew, law enforcement, the military had changed me.

What do you mean by that?

I was more focused on doing everything right, more rigid, more— and not that I wasn't already an A personality anyway, but it just was that. And then the timely, you know, getting time. If you're going to do, you're going to do it right. We're going to do it now. This is all of this. When you go to the military, you know, you got your time in your job is probably about 18 months, maybe 2 years if you're lucky, 3, you know, in that same job with that same position, maybe even at the same station. When you go into that, they're not in a big hurry. They know they've got 25 or 30 years and they're going to retire. So it's just a whole different rhythm you have to learn to do.

That's interesting. So I did that. I don't think I've ever really recognized that some of our intensity is directly related to like time in grade or time in position where you feel like the finish line is coming. Whereas when you get into the civilian world, it's what finish line, you know? Oh, that's way over there.

We're not even in a hurry. We've got, you know, years. And then my last position before I retired, I was the chief executive of a law enforcement agency. And of course I went in and there were some things that mainly needed to be addressed. And of course I still had that intensity. And when I would go to the commissioners and talk to them about it, they were like, we don't understand. It's always been this way. There was probably one thing that just always kind of set me on edge was just because we've done it this way doesn't mean we should continue to do this this way. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and getting not the results you want, you're gonna have to make a change. So just learning that, how to deal with people, that it wasn't, again, we talked about, you know, those informative years of your 20s. Now I'm moving into my late 20s, early 30s. Mid-30s. It's learning how to deal in the environment, having to— okay, rein yourself back. It's not always the way you perceive it to be. You need to look at a different scope. You need to understand that people are not running at the same pace you are. Not only are they running the same pace, they don't see it from the same perspective you do. How do you go in and see what other people's perspective is so that you can make change? And then How do you help with buy-in? How do you get them to buy into the change that may be necessary?

So, yeah, buying into that change. I mean, you had mentioned to me earlier that there's a significant challenge or problem as you work towards being able to stay focused on the work that you do. And you alluded to a series of things in your life, like peeling back the layers of an onion. That have kind of revealed this need for a personality change, a character change. Can you talk about that for a little bit?

Yeah, I think as I started to go along, I started to realize that there were some areas of my life that was broken, that my perspective was broken, or my woundedness was taking over. The things that I had seen and experienced as a young law enforcement officer, as a military person, was starting to impact how I was relating to the world. And, um, part of the catalyst of— I'd already understood PTSD, and I'm sure that I had PTSD after certain events, i.e., the first call to the suicide. I just stuffed it, you know. You just learned how to cope in it. You learn how to manage that.

And for our listeners that's not familiar with that, it's post-traumatic stress.

Thank you. And so, but the question is, is do you let it become a long-term injury, or is it something that you just experience and you learn how to cope with and you move on? And are your coping mechanisms good? Because some coping mechanisms are drugs, alcohol, sex, whatever you— to numb that. I just had to realize, okay, first of all, I'm a leader, I'm a mother, I'm a wife. I can't do— I have to deal with what's going on inside me. I have to— in the military and in law enforcement, you stuff your emotions a whole lot. Where are you? And then how do you regulate? How do you know what are good emotions and how are not? So peeling back the layers of that, and it really became evident for me after my husband came back from taking a brigade to Afghanistan, and we lost 9 soldiers in the process of that year, which compared to a lot of other units is small, but it still was detrimental to the cohesiveness of the unit. And there was some toxic leadership he was working under, and his edginess, and I started seeing PTSD, which made me recognize, ooh, but my reaction to his is also needs to be addressed. So working through that and realizing that I needed to be aware of my own issues, as well as I needed to be compassionate to his issues, his way, how he grieved. Again, we just talked earlier about how men deal with loss or death, or it's usually much more harsh, whereas women either introvert or get emotional, internalize it. So just pulling that back, and in that process God led me to actually do a master's in crisis and trauma counseling. And it's just how God works. As you're doing all that reading and you're processing, you're not only saying, oh, but I noticed that in so-and-so, or I see this, you're like, ooh, but I had this issue too I need to deal with. So it just, it's that reactionary. I started to be less reactionary and started to realize I had to press in. And I think I used the example of, um, when you kayak, when you whitewater kayak, when you get into the rapids, you don't lean back because you take all the water in. You've got to lean into your kayak and get through that rough water, and then you can relax when the water gets smooth again. And that's kind of what I had to learn how to do. I had to learn how to press into those rough places in my life, in my family, and my relationships instead of hiding from them. And then when we got to a more stable place, I could set and rest and assess, okay, what do I— what do I need to change? How do I change?

When my first marriage was really going into a bad place and I knew it, I could feel it, I walked into the bookstore and I was looking at the shelves for some type of marriage book, and I found one called The Surrendered Wife.. And I was like, oh, this is such a good place to start. I'm just gonna focus on me. Right? And I remember it is a good book. I do recommend it. But I remember opening the book and there was like a warning on the inside right away that is like, if you have a spouse that gambles or has mental health issues, then this is not the best book to follow. Work with a professional counselor. And in that moment, Diana, I remembered telling myself, well, thank goodness I didn't marry one of those. And I flipped the page, right?

And just keep reading the book.

And old Shelly now, right? She looks back and she's like, Shelly, you're so stupid. Like, you actually had those issues live. Like, you were living in those issues. You just didn't have your eyes open enough to even see them or call them what they were, right? Because self-reflection, self-focus, it is hard work. And sometimes you have to say words like trauma and stress and brokenness, and nobody wants to say these words.

First of all, Shelly, you point out a great point of we like to look at, oh, this is gonna— how I'm gonna change the other person. We don't look at, oh, do I maybe need to change, or is there something in me that's doing this? And so self-reflection is not something we naturally do. And what we don't realize, and I think if we realized it more, is that we can be wounded by simple things. By the fact that continually our husband says they're going to be home or they're going to call if they're not going to be home on time, and then they don't. And then you kind of— there's this little lie that, oh, he doesn't really love me, this is all this. And then you create this vow, well, okay, if he's not going to love me and he can't be home on dinner on time, or he can't communicate with me into this, then I don't need to work so hard at this. So it's this defensive— we have this natural human protective defensiveness that wants to rise up instead of, okay, what is the root of the issue? Why is it so important? First of all, does he really care if dinner's ready or if we have it on time? What does— why is it so important to me? What's the root of this? Is this a control issue with me? Is control coming out of fear? Do I not have faith that he loves me? If I don't have faith that he loves me and he cares about me, we've got a lot deeper issues that we need to get into. Lot, lot deeper issues to get into. And are we just gliding along, or are we changing the oil on our marriage? Are we fueling up? Are we rotating the tires? Are we putting new tires on? Just as an example, are there dashboard lights that say the air is low? Maybe you need to quit driving. No, I don't recognize those lights. I just keep doing because isn't this the way it is? Instead of looking at the world, okay, every Everybody else is doing that, and it— how's it working for them? Do I want to follow what everybody else is doing, or is there another path?

Or is there another path? I'm smiling so big right now because most women don't talk about marriage like, is here, let's do an oil change on our relationship. But I love this. I feel like this is the type of conversation that we're not having and we should be having, because I have talked with so many strong women, right? And strong-willed women who want to have healthy marriages and healthy platonic relationships, but there's struggles all the time.

Mm-hmm.

Who does this and who does that? And I did this, so you need to do that. And, um, and that's not healthy, right? It's more of a transactional type of relationship.

Ooh, transactional. That's a good hit on that. I think, um, we think relationships are 50/50, 60/40. But if we really live a selfless or others over self, not to abate ourself, not to degrade ourselves, but if we give out of love, out of a place where we're filled with a love other than from that person, specifically the love of God, that it's a lot easier to give 100 to 100. And if every, if both sides of that relationship are willing to give what they have to give that day, okay, so you're a mom of two little kids and you didn't sleep well last night. Your 100% is going to look a whole lot different than the woman who has adult kids that are off at college, that got a good night's sleep and gets to go to the gym that day. So it's being self-aware of— and quit comparing. We kill ourselves by comparing. That you need to have compassion for the shoes that somebody else is walking in, but if you're not walking in those shoes, why are you comparing yourselves? And I say this cautiously, I like social media. There are so many blessings in it. And I love the fact that you can podcast and do what you're doing and actually have a conversation with women, with other people. But we've got to quit using it as a tool that we gauge our life by. Because to be honest, when I see some of these photos, I know the backstory to that person's life and I'm like, you're not being real.

You're just— or, or the photos now aren't even the real person, right? They're AI doctored. I'm like, who is that? You don't look like that.

Exactly. Oh, you didn't get Botox, but the photo looks like it. Yeah, yeah. Let's be us. We were fearfully and wonderfully made for a purpose. Yes, age gracefully. Take care of yourself. Care about yourself. Because you have things that you want to do and people you want to live life with. But quit trying to be perfect. Perfect is a false— it's a lie. Perfection is a lie. Excellence is a great thing, though.

When you were coming up professionally, whether it was as a police officer or even in the military, were you looking— what were you looking for with your mentors and, you know, the leadership around you that you really felt like you reflected with very good? What were some of their qualities?

I think the qualities I liked as I look back over the people that influenced as a mentor, even from a distance, was they cared about the people around them. They were more willing to pour into people than, okay, get out of my way, I'm trying to make my way up the ladder. Not that they weren't marching up that hill, but they weren't going to run you over in the process. Now, if you were slowing down the line, they would probably do an encouraging word or a little prodding. But the honesty, how they lived their life, they didn't just say one thing and live another. They had the integrity of speaking and living the same thing. I think that's where we get really upset with people that are hypocritical. That is, you're telling me to do this, but you're doing something very different. And our natural justice gene inside our humanity is like, wait, wait, who are you to tell me what to do if you're not living it? If you're going to tell people to lead from the front, get out front and lead. And I think that—

yeah, I mean, it's all the commanders that have DUIs, right? It's the— oh yeah, church people that judge worse than others. And I've had all of those instances, and it is very, very difficult to try to follow somebody when they're two-faced, you know, really at the end of the day.

The word hypocrite comes from the old acting of wearing a mask. So you're masking who you really are and you're acting like you're someone you're not. And even children, small children see that through that as a young age and it makes them change their opinion of you. So why would adults that are a little more aware not be. We want people we can trust. We want people we can be real with and authentic with. Um, Brené Brown wrote a great book, um, Daring Greatly, and in it she talks about that vulnerability. Not that you can be vulnerable with everybody, but you, you should have a group that you can talk honestly with that can say, I don't think you see this right. I have a sister that's great at that as far as Uh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. And I have a couple really close godly friends now that I can say, okay, I need to have a perspective. I realize this is how I see it. I need to— if I'm wrong, please correct me. But it's inviting those women into your life, and they're not easy to find, especially in a world that wants to project perfection instead of, okay, this is who I am and I'm okay with who I am. This is who God made to be. He's processing me. I am loved no matter— not dependent on what I do or who I am. I am loved because God is love and he loves us. He loved us all before we were born. He made a covenant with himself to save us before the foundations of the earth, as it says in Ephesians. This was the plan from the get-go. There was not a secondary plan that Christ would come and live as a fully God, fully man, and then sacrifice so that we could be back in relationship with our Creator because we broke that out of our own rebellion and selfishness. Our selfishness is what gets us in trouble. So if we can lay aside our wants and serve others, I think that's others over self. That's the whole goal of what you try to present now. You, you do the best you can to consider others, but sometimes you, you gotta take care of yourself too. So there's this beautiful balance, this beautiful flow, almost dance you have to do for this.

And I wanna learn more about how you stay at ease, but I don't wanna gloss over this conversation about women friendship. It is, in my opinion, very difficult for a strong woman, a military woman, a policewoman, to cultivate and hold on to deep, meaningful female friendships. So I think some of that is that facade where we feel like maybe we don't always fit in, you know, or we're the only woman in the room. There are no women here for me to make friends with. Can you share with me a little bit about how female friendship has played played a part for you up until this point in your life?

Yeah, I would say for a lot of years I did not have a lot of close female friends, especially when I was serving in law enforcement or in the military, because there's this competitiveness seems to come against us. We're competing for the next position because we're not always competing against the male, we're always subcategorized. Not consciously maybe, but it's there. I have one girlfriend that I actually went to airborne school with that I am still friends with. Now, our friendship has waned and flowed. There was a couple years we didn't talk to each other. I said something that hurt her. I thought I was speaking truth. She wasn't ready to receive it, and it caused us to break. Now, by great blessing, in the last year we've been able to renew that, and just it— we walk back into the relationship we had before. Actually richer because we're not competing anymore. We're not feeling, you know, and when you're young and, and males are around, I guess it's that part of that you want to be the approved girl, the liked girl. Um, so that's not always easy. And then when you get to the mother stage, I think that you have it, but we're so caught up in raising children and life and careers that to have that deepness And I, to be honest, I think until you're 30, it's really hard to trust other females from my personal experience, unless you just get really fortunate that you grow up with somebody that's close to you. But I don't see that in that law enforcement, military environment unless it's somebody totally separated from that life with you. I think as you get older and you become comfortable in your identity, and who you are, and you're not competing, and you're not questioning, am I good enough, then it becomes easier. And then I think when you find a group of women, in my case, that have a faith in Christ, then that— you're just my sister, and he loves you because you're made in his image, and I am too. And, and His love is 100% for you and 100% for me. It's not a pie where we have to delve out, you get a bigger piece than I do. And then you're able to walk alongside and share and be honest and vulnerable and authentic. And I think that's what our heart longs for. So, but you have to be discerning. I'm not going to tell you— I didn't run across several females that I thought I could trust and— yeah, stabbed you.

Shouldn't have. Yeah, exactly. Got a lot of those in my background too. Yeah.

So it's that discernment. It's okay. Is this person, and, and you can't run into it full force, which it probably— in my early 20s, I thought everybody was like me and I could just trust everybody as much as I trusted myself. Now if I look back, I probably shouldn't have trusted either one, but yeah, cheers to that.

So you said something so profound: when you're not questioning, am I good enough, then you're more free to truly love others. And that reinforces our conversation about it has to start with self-awareness, knowing who you are. And when you love yourself, then you have the space and the freedom to be able to love others at a deeper level. Yeah.

And it's very hard, I think, to love ourselves. And I'd like to say in this day and age, but I think it's always been that way because we know all our imperfections. We know all our, our brokenness. But for me, that comes out of the fact that if God the Creator, who knows everything about my— me that I even try to deny myself or deceive myself about, and still loves me fully, faithfully, purely, then why can I not love me? You know, that love others as you love yourself. Well, how are you going to love others if you don't love yourself?

What would you say to the smart-alecky woman in her 20s that's like all about herself? What do you mean I don't love myself? How do you address that personality, right? Because you know you really can look at her and be like, you do not love yourself.

Do you really love yourself if you're creating conflict with everybody and you've got to be the center in the room?

Do you really? No.

You're trying to prove that you're lovable. If you've got to have the hot pink car and the hot pink outfit when you go into public, what you're saying is, 'Notice me because I don't feel seen, loved, or heard,' instead of saying, 'You know what, I don't need to make a big scene because I know I'm loved.' I— yes, it's nice to be seen, it's nice to be appreciated, but you give a lot of people power over you when you need them to validate you. And when you can't live or breathe because somebody won't validate you, they have now become an idol and can control you to do anything they want. And this is a very, very dangerous place to be in a world that desires— I mean, you can just look around our world at people that are self-sacrificing themselves. For fame, for recognition, and it's Hollywood. How many of them have— they know it, they know they're not what everybody thinks they are, so they have to medicate themselves. Is that really what we want? Is that really what we were designed for? No, we were designed to live in relationship, in acceptance and love, in this Understanding we're all different and broken, but we have value. We have value. Every life has value, no matter how—

You've walked that path from not only serving yourself but getting into the clinical care side of things, right? Recognizing for yourself and for your loved ones what mental wellness markers like post-traumatic stress can mean and can look at. Can you take a few minutes and share with us the work that you're doing now and the impact that you're able to continue to have on this community?

Yeah, right now I am working with an organization called A Warrior Set Free, and the concept there is to help veterans, first responders, and their spouses, or active duty for that matter. I mean, 'cause you're still a veteran, you've served, find wholeness and freedom from the wounds of life, from the, and overcome the internal battles that you have. So what we— there's several different ways that you can be involved or that I am involved. There's a women's retreat. We do that about twice a year in Georgia through the Warriors Set Free website. You can look that up and it's called Reflect, Heroes Reflect. And then there's the men's. It's called the Warrior Battle. And they do that about 4 times a year right now and have for a couple of years. And you go to the website and look at that. There's also appointments where you basically come in, and as a female, you'll sit with two females, and we'll walk through your life, and we'll do what we call a spiritual reflection cleansing, looking at your life and the decisions you made and where you find yourself now. And then how do you walk out with your identity solid in who Christ says you are? How do you walk this out? How do you live victoriously? How do you to overcome those compulsions or those anxieties or whatever it is that's eating you. The men do it on the same— on the side, on their side as well. You can make an appointment and come in and do that, and that's all through the website at warriorsetfree.org. And the, the thing is, and then as there's an aftercare, I guess you want to call it, after things, once a month we meet in Wyoming at Michigan. There's a dinner that starts at 6 where a veteran will come in and speak, or first responder will come in and tell their story. The last couple have been very interesting because they've been husband-wife teams, so they talk about how they've walked this course, some of the hardships, some of the, the brokenness, but also how God's redeemed all that and the beauty of the redemption of those relationships.

It is. And I know I can share with you You know, that's what was missing from my first marriage. I know that now, I can say that now, right? God was not in both of us in our first marriage. And so now I am remarried, and even going into that marriage, my perspective was he has to be a godly man, this has to be a biblical marriage, that's the only way it will work. And I'm excited at this point in my life, we've been married almost 9 years now, to be able to say, like, it is legit. There's such a huge difference when you give it to God, right, when you put him above everything. And my husband now is a first responder as well. So we're right there with you, man. I feel like you and I are so interconnected on so many levels, all the way back to, you said you were a gymnast growing up. Yeah. Like, so was I, man. Listen, moms, you want your girls to be awesome, put 'em in gymnastics. Yeah.

You're, the coaches are hard, but it, the endurance of resilience you learn is wonderful as far as it sure is. That hardheaded, I can do this and okay, so it hurts a little, but I can get up again.

Yeah.

Athletics in general.

Absolutely. So Dinah, you had the opportunity before today to take the Wildflower assessment for women veterans. Can you share with us how that went?

Ah, yeah, that was very interesting. I would've never considered myself a primrose, which basically, if I remember, means I'm, and then the second one was a sunflower, which I love 'cause I spent a lot of years in Kansas, so I love sunflower fields.

But I'm a sunflower too, for our listeners.

Yes, I know, which just means that I'm steady and I'm contemplative and I am not quick to react, which I think is not probably what you would have said about me in my 20s, but where I'm at in life now, yes. And it's a, it's a good place. And I think the assessment was very, um, on mark. I sent it to girlfriend of mine that was a Marine, and she did it. And when she told me what she was scored, I was like, yep, that's right on. And I've sent it to my sister who just retired from active duty after 31 years as a helicopter pilot. So yeah, and, and she's— I think it's hit her pretty mark on too. So I think it's a great assessment for a veteran female to kind of see where we're at.

You and I have the same, yeah. Top 2, sunflower. I'm sunflower, primrose, which is funny because they're actually opposite, right? So sunflower is external processing, primrose is internal processing. And so you and I are like the same woman but in a different dimension, right? Like if I would've made different choices or if I would've focused more into the depth, right? Then I would've become a clinical therapist, which is the route that you took. But instead I went more of the sunflower route and I'm over here building leadership frameworks and, you know, working on the framework side of things. So it's, it's so interesting because I feel like I know you at a deeper level with, within just, you know, one conversation. And it, it allow— I know what it's allowed me to do is to honor and respect the woman in front of me almost immediately at a deeper level. Because I can, I can see a little bit more about how she is the way she is, right? Like if you're talking to a Holly Hawk and she's busy snapping pictures of herself, like you can hate her a little bit less because you know that that's just how she operates. It's not because she's conceited, right? So we can start changing the language of some of our negative viewpoints that we might have of each other.

Yeah. I think that what I hear you saying, Shelly, is all of us have a little girl inside of us. That comes out that is part of who we— what we've experienced, what we've been through, and who we actually are by nature. And if we keep that in mind instead of trying to have somebody fit into a category, I think we do better at being able to have relationships with them. No, we're not going to get along with everybody all the time. There are some people that can be your besties and there are some people you can just drink coffee with, but you can usually have coffee with your bestie and be pretty honest. The other person, you might just talk about music, what's going on in the news, whatever it is. But I think we can really connect with a lot of people if we allow ourselves to get past our preconceived ideas.

So, Dinah, tell me, how is it that you stay at ease? Because you are the high-risk category of someone to go over the edge. You've got years of trauma, third-party traumas, first-party traumas. You've had a lot of exposure to, you know, the evils in the world. How is it that you stay from going over the edge and you're able to just be at ease?

I think, Shelly, once you recognize that you have that trauma, you have a responsibility to yourself to seek healing of that trauma, or you do go over the edge. And I'm not going to tell you there weren't dark places. There were dark places. But I didn't want to remain in those dark places. For whatever reason, I knew that was not what I wanted to be. And so I started seeking help. And, and again, talking to somebody who's been through trauma, if it just means— there's a great program called Reboot where you can meet with other people once a week, and a lot of areas have them where you can meet with other people that have experienced similar situation, serious life, so you don't feel alone. And I think when we think we're the only one that's suffering like that, that isn't healthy. I think when we find other people who've suffered similar to ours and found a way out, or we can help somebody as we help ourselves find the way out— and usually there's a, a person that leads the group, so they've already found their way out, so there's that hope. That hope that comes from being able to do that. But you owe yourself, your family. I think in a— everyone that you love, you owe in a sense, but most of all yourself, that healing. You need to heal. You need to be not afraid to heal. We all need healing from the time we're little kids. There's something that happens.

There isn't. It's hard to heal when you can't even admit that there's a boo-boo.

Exactly. Yeah.

Would you— or my little girl, she's always asking for Band-Aids. She's always like, Mommy, boo-boo! Mommy, boo-boo! I'm like, no, you're fine. How do we lose that, man? We get so jaded.

I just think we get battered so much that we're like, okay, this is just life. But if we're just told to suck it up and move on, or there are the ones that have been overly I don't wanna say coddled, but your boo-boos, your identity, you become the boo-boo. You're the victim. You become— victim becomes your identity. And that's not it either. We were designed to be victorious, live victoriously.

I love that. That's a perspective shift that needs to happen in the women veteran community for sure. Well, Dinah, before I let you go, you have some time with our audience. Is there anything else that you'd like to share?

I would like to share that everyone that's listening, when you think there is no hope, there is hope. There is a way. Reach out to someone. Reach out to someone. There are so many different great teachers, preachers doing podcasts. There are so many great groups that will help you. Again, I'll go back to the Set Free Warriors, setfree.org. Just especially, there are great organizations for military wives like The Planting. Or there's just so many out there. Look, ask somebody, send a note, get help. Don't think this is your existence. You were made to thrive, not survive. And I thank you, Shelly, for letting me talk.

Thank you. It's been my joy and my honor to have you on the show today, Dinah.

It's been an honor and a great thing. Someday maybe we'll just sit down and have coffee.

And that was my conversation with Dinah Durham. What I'm taking away from this is layered. There's the part about who we become when we stop needing people to confirm that we're enough. There's also the part about the difference between perfection, which is a trap, and excellence, which is a standard that we can actually stand on. And then there's the part about what real friendship requires and what it gives back. That was a conversation that I didn't didn't expect to have today, and I'm so glad that we did. The thread that runs through all of it is the investigation itself, the file most of us kept closed because we're moving too fast to open it. What she found when she finally did this is that it wasn't the weight that was the problem. It was not knowing what was in there. And so that's the shift, and it's the shift that's available to all of us. Now, for my women veterans that are in this audience, if you've ever felt underrepresented, misunderstood, or like you're navigating terrain that nobody else can see, well, you are not alone and you're not wrong. Mission Wildflower names what's happening in our landscape, the wilderness situations, the patterns. We're a community built on peer-to-peer truth. We have new content every week, both free and paid. You can find it in the show notes at shellyrood.substack.com. That's Mission Wildflower. Now, I'm with you every Tuesday, and so I'll be back next week with a special message from me to you. Until then, I want you to stay hardcore, be at ease, and trust the process.

You're listening to Hardcore and At Ease. Keep the conversation going at join.othersoverself.com.