Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign the podcast for those who find themselves immersed in adversity and choose to write their story instead of having others.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: Write it for them.
[00:00:18] Speaker A: I'm Drew Duraney and I'm your host. Today's guest is Thomas Lagrave. Thomas J. Lagrave Jr. Is a best selling authority, licensed clinical social worker and a powerful voice in adolescent mental health and social development.
A former hospital corpsman with the United States Navy Seals, Tom brings more than 35 years experience working with over 3000 young men specializing in the emotional and developmental challenges of adolescence and the transition to adulthood. As a former founder of the Honor Bound Academy, a year long immersive program in Sonoma, California, Tom mentored young men through structured rites of passage, healing work and emotional accountability.
While the program has since concluded, Tom remains deeply committed to directly supporting youth while building trust with the adults who guide them through community speaking engagements, clinical work and real talk conversations that resonate with both parents and teens.
A recovering addict and alcoholic for over three decades, Tom merges his lived experience to with deep clinical knowledge to help families and America's youth navigate the often overwhelming world of raising emotionally resilient young men in a digital age.
Tom's career work includes hospitals, addiction recovery, adolescent mental health, youth incarceration, and as a military, family and life consultant for the U.S. armed Forces Special Operations Command.
Tom is a media favorite having interviewed on Good Day San Antonio, arc, Seattle, Como News and countless podcasts. He's known for saying the quiet parts out loud and helping parents confront the big scary questions. What did no one tell me?
Why is no one talking about this?
With a rare mix of empathy, grit and hard earned wisdom, Tom equips both young men and the adults who care about them with the tools to thrive in a world that desperately needs emotionally healthy men.
Enjoy the show. Hey Tom, so nice to see you.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: Wonderful to be here. Thank you.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: It's my pleasure. So this is the first chance you and I have had to see each other on Zoom.
When we had our intro or our pre podcast recording call my one of my children. My middle guy. My son had no I was my was my older guy. My middle guy. He was having knee surgery. Yeah I had one head did a wisdom's teeth wisdom tooth a different day. I'm going all over the place but yeah my middle guy who's 21 had a knee surgery and and I was there and I didn't want to cancel the call with Tom so I tried calling from the place they had bad wi fi. I ended up driving around the town for better signal to get to. Get a chance to talk to Tom.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: But we made it work.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: We made it work.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: And.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: And I'm so happy to have. Have Tom on.
So, folks, you know, I always start with talking about how when we're young, you know, and it's not a malicious teaching, we're taught by everybody when we're young that life is linear. You know, if we do A plus, B plus, C, D is going to happen. You know, you're born, you go diapers, you crawl, you walk, you go to preschool or kindergarten. Preschool, whatever. Preschool, kindergarten, middle school, high school, college. You get married, you have kids, you raise them the same way. And.
And for the most part, life is linear until it's not.
Yeah.
Ultimately, an external circumstance comes along, gets in between one of those letters, and then kind of derails our path from that straight line to a more circuitous route.
When that happens, adversity shows up.
We either see it or we don't.
Man number one is the man who doesn't see the adversity. He's got a ton of blind spots. He. He's just not paying attention. He's on autopilot. He's living life the way people told him, that linear path. And when things happen, he just says, okay, that's happening, and I'll just do it, and nothing changes.
Then there's man number two. Man number two notices the adversity. But you know what?
Man number two is the victim. He plays the blame game. That's life doing it to him, not for him.
He can't control anything, so he decides to live life just the way it's presented to him. Woe is me. And on his deathbed, he has a ton of regrets.
Then there's man number three.
That's Tom. Tom Lagrave. That's the men and women I have on this show. They see the adversity and they say, you know what? I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.
That adversity is not a barrier. It's an opportunity. An opportunity for me to take massive action, do something different, and become a stronger man on the other side as Tom Lagrave. So I'm going to ask Tom for the audience, my friend, reach back as far as you need to for that defining moment, that tap on the shoulder, the whisper in the ear, or what I needed two by four upside my head, that really transformed you from the man you were to the man you are, and how that transformation impacted you as a person and then kind of handled a difference in your professional life.
Care to share My friend.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Now, for me to start, it would be age 14.
Did my first drink and my first drug.
[00:05:47] Speaker A: You get a little louder. I can't. I want to make sure we can hear you.
[00:05:50] Speaker B: Yeah, let's make sure you can hear me. So everything for me started at the age of 14.
[00:05:56] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:05:56] Speaker B: I did my first drink and my first drug, and it took me almost 15 years to realize that that was a problem.
So at the age of 18, I left my father's house. He threw me out because I was getting high with a younger brother, and there was nowhere to go. I was out on the street. So I decided, you know what? I'm not going back to him. I'm not going to kiss his rear end. I'm going to figure this out. And I entered the military. I joined the Navy, became a hospital corpsman. Turns out that in the third week of boot camp, I was given an opportunity to take a screening test to become a Navy seal.
So I had no idea what that was, but I liked the challenge. In high school, I was athletic, and it's like, let's see what happens. Bottom line is, I passed the screening test. I end up on the Silver Strand on February 29, 1980. After six months, I. I graduate from Bud's Basic Underwater Demolition Seal Training Class 106.
And now I head to the teams and I become an operator. And again, at 14, I started using. And I'd say within a very short period of time, I'm an addict, alcoholic. That takes 15 more years to figure that out.
So I get into the military, and I got the opportunity of a lifetime, and I take it, and I succeed with it. And for the next nine years and six months, I navigate the world as an operator as I am continually diminishing in my all aspects. Mental acuity, physical acuity, spiritual acuity. And so nine years and six months, I ended up getting discharged from SEAL Team 1 for drug use. Oh, boy.
Now there's the pivot.
Now, I. In that moment, I'm 29. I'd been operating for nine and a half years, and everybody screwed me.
And the fact of the matter was, the military is not going to accept my behavior. It's done, and I can't go back. So now I have to go forward into a civilian world I've never lived in.
So the first thing is I go home to my father, who says, oh, I see you're back. And I see nothing has changed.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Oh, boy.
[00:08:15] Speaker B: So he says, if you're coming here, you're going to take care of this problem or go somewhere else.
So the bottom line is, is I took the offer. I stayed with him. Four months later, I enter a 90 day recovery facility, and that's a beginning. What it did was give me 90 days without a drink or a drug for the first time in my life since I'm 14 years old.
[00:08:41] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:08:42] Speaker B: But now I've got to live life. And all the doo doo that gets dropped on me without my crutch, without having what I use in drugs and alcohol. And what it became was a challenge to understand emotions as the military trains all of us, not just special forces, but anybody that goes to boot camp. It's all about giving, creating a. A circumstance, putting you in an environment that you can pull a trigger, because that's what the military is all about. And what they do is you're. You shut off your emotions in order to pull that trigger.
Now, drugs and alcohol do the same thing. They shut off our emotions so that we don't have to feel.
So now I'm 29 years old. I've got 90 days in recovery, and I've got no clue how to live life because they're telling me it's in my past. I have to go back to see it and feel it. And I'm like, you've got to be kidding.
[00:09:43] Speaker A: Oh, boy. Wow.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: So I'm. Got about a year and I'm going to use. I. It's coming. I. I can't figure this out. So it was the first time in my life that I had a fear like this that I'm gonna fail and it's gonna cost me, you know, my life or incarceration, because those were the only options left if I did not figure out how to live life without drugs and alcohol.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: That sounds like you went from. You. You started out with the man number one. Man number two is when you got. When you got discharged, you were. It was everybody else's fault. Right. And then now you're man number three. You're realizing accountability. Yeah, you know what? I totally forgot. I usually. I always thank the person who introduced us. I just remembered I didn't do that in the beginning here, folks. And I don't even edit this stuff. So now you're going to hear the thank you. And almost in the middle. So we'll get back to Tom. But I want to thank Tom's publicist, Jasmine. Is it Blumhoff? Blow off Blumhoff. So, Jasmine, thank you for introducing my guest, Tom Le Grave to me. All right, so that's done. I'm sorry. I didn't put that. Now it's out of sequence. But that's life. So back to Tom now. He is now man number three. He's got to step up, do the right thing, or else he's either going to jail or he's failing. He's got to hear dad say it again. So.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:04] Speaker B: So my decision was I, I need to go and see what it was like to be 14 years old, to feel. And my decision brought me to become an overnight counselor at a recovery facility for adolescents called Daytop Village.
[00:11:22] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:11:23] Speaker B: I spent the next four years watching, being taught, learning. I did not go there to help kids.
[00:11:30] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: I went there for a selfish reason. I went there to learn how to live life.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: And at the end of that four year period, not only did I find an understanding, but those youth gave me purpose and meaning that I now began a journey that I have dedicated my life to a generation of youth at a, a transitional period going from adolescence to adulthood. And where that came about was I had no education. I just had an innate skill and that. And for whatever reason, kids responded to me. So I left Daytop Village because I wasn't going to get a caseload. I didn't have an education. And that was fine.
I'm not going back to school. I'm highly educated, highly trained. I can figure this out.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:12:21] Speaker B: So next job, Boys and Girls Club.
[00:12:23] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:12:24] Speaker B: I'm a unit director for the next four years, ages 6 to 18.
They top village court. Court appointed them. Kids got to talk to me. They Boys and Girls Club. They don't got to talk to me. They can ignore me. And for the first two years there, I felt disrespected. I felt, you know, I wanted to throttle them.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:47] Speaker B: But I also had made a commitment to say, I'm not going to quit. I'm not going to give up on myself or on them. Somewhere two years, it came apparent to those young folks that my word was my bond. If I said it, I would do it. I was always on time. I was always there. I was always available.
Now those are two jobs, eight years. And at this point, I've got an occurrence that is happening that is troubling for me.
Young folks would bring me issues about things that were going on in their house, in their family, in their life. And that wasn't my background. I didn't have knowledge to how to answer that. And so this is where I humbled myself to say, okay, you need to figure out how to become better educated. So at that stage, I'm 39 years, 38 years old, and I go back to school.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: Okay, wonderful. Okay.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: Bachelor's master's license, board certification, and that's all. Wonderful. All that on your wall?
[00:13:52] Speaker A: Yeah, sure.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: I don't have it for that. I have it because I can't have a kid bring something to me that I can't answer or find the answer.
So therein lies the circle. Everything else that came after that was to this point. Right now I am in semi retirement. I have a private practice. I've been clinical for the last 20 years. I've been working with youth for the last 35 years.
[00:14:19] Speaker A: And the other, the other huge thing, you've been sober for how long?
[00:14:26] Speaker B: For five and a half years.
At 32 years, I relapsed.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: Oh my goodness. Okay.
[00:14:32] Speaker B: Five years ago I relapsed because I had bought into my press.
I thought I had arrived. I am talented, I am special. I am unique in my community. People come to me, they believe in me. And you know what?
I forgot the golden rule that I'm a. I'm Tom, addict, alcoholic, first and foremost, before anything else.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: First. Okay, all right.
[00:14:59] Speaker B: And I forgot that lesson. And so five and a half years ago I relapsed and it was horrible for some of my life that I had suicidal ideation.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:15:09] Speaker B: I have a family. We're all addicts and alcoholists in recovery. My two younger brothers came to me at two weeks and said, look, you're either going to give it up and we're here for you, or you keep going where you're going, but don't come to us, don't come near us, stay away.
And at two weeks I had had enough to know that this was not good and this wasn't going anywhere good. And so I had to humble myself to again begin a process of looking inside to find where the demons that I did not come to terms with all those years ago that I needed to find. And five and a half years ago, I began a process and today I'm probably happier than I've ever been.
[00:15:52] Speaker A: Good for you. So did you go back to another rehab?
[00:16:00] Speaker B: It was.
I drew close to my brothers. They hovered around me. We knew I knew how to get sober. You go to meetings, you get your sponsor, you do your steps. All of that was now again my responsibility to put into my life to make sure, circling myself with the right kinds of people.
[00:16:20] Speaker A: And you learn, you learned who you were enough where you knew you could go inside and handle and the truth was inside of you and you could solve it. With the help of your brothers. That's awesome. That's wonderful.
This. Let me see, the second thing I wanted. Oh, so then. Okay, so that was 32. And you said at 39 you went back to school. So then seven years later, you went back to school. Got it. Got it. Good for you. Five and a half years. Wow. All right, so now tell me what you're doing. Now, when you say you have private practice, I know you're doing Tuesdays and Thursday, semi retired. We. What does that practice look like? And what type of clients do you have?
[00:17:01] Speaker B: When Covid came down, telehealth became a go to. Prior to Covid, therapists did face to face. That was the only thing there was Telehealth. But nobody believed in it. At this stage, it's proven itself. So on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have five clients each day, 10.
And I. I do that to keep my skill set honed and sharp.
[00:17:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:27] Speaker B: The rest of the time, I now get to volunteer where I want to go. During my.
The last 30 years of.
And especially the last 20 years, my skill set is expensive.
You know, I charge a lot of money, and there wasn't an ability to get to everybody that I wanted to because I had to, you know, what, Pay the bills, got family.
At this stage, I get to choose who I give my talents to, and I get to give it where I want, and I don't have to charge because I am. Okay.
[00:18:05] Speaker A: Yep. I love that. And that's. That's. That's the progress that people like you who. You don't want to keep all that information, knowledge to yourself. You saw. You see a need out there, and you want to share it with others. And. And, you know, I love that you value.
You value your value.
You know, a lot of. A lot of us, we. We don't value ourselves enough, so we undercharge.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: You know, it's like holier than thou, you know, and I'm. I'm. I'm definitely one who did that. I. I would give stuff away for free and. And all that. And, you know, and then, you know, wow, that's so nice. Well, then I turn around, I'm like, how the heck am I gonna pay my bills? So then you really got to rethink it and say, you know, what if I respect myself and I value myself, then I'm going to charge accordingly. And therefore, the. The. The clients or the patients who. Who value what you do will pay that price, because. And then when they pay that price, they're valuing themselves.
[00:19:02] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:19:03] Speaker A: Because they are. They realize they're important enough to invest in.
[00:19:08] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: I love it. All right, so take us to, to present day. Anything else you want to, you want to share that? Do you think the audience would benefit from?
[00:19:17] Speaker B: There's Honor Bound Academy was a moment in my life. I did not get it to the level that I wanted to. It was, it just didn't unfold. I was, I was unable to get the funding to bring it about to the degree I wanted.
[00:19:36] Speaker A: What's Academy called?
[00:19:38] Speaker B: I'm sorry, Honor bound academy.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:19:40] Speaker B: Adolescent 18, 19, 20 year olds.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: Transitioning adolescent to adulthood. I have been working with youth for long enough that I've seen a couple generations now myself.
[00:19:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:53] Speaker B: The. What is it? The millennials and this new generation.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:56] Speaker B: And I've seen what we all have in common and what's missing, and that's where I came up. Honorbound Academy is a rite of passage, a one year program.
And that's what was my life for a period of time, a 10 year period that I tried to bring all that together.
That today it's.
It did not get funded. But what I did was I could not give all that knowledge insight because I had gone back to academia to peer review to have it. So it could be a gold standard. And I would say about four or five years ago, right. When I relapsed again, I had an epiphany of, you know, the country's going in a place where I don't like it as an adult, but especially for kids. So I wrote a book.
[00:20:45] Speaker A: Oh, good.
[00:20:46] Speaker B: And the reason I wrote the book was because I wanted a platform to have the ability to be heard in a larger capacity. The book's title is Special Welfare Social Warfare, Adolescence to Adulthood, A Guidebook.
So I'm telling our story in our country today. I'm telling my story of how I got educated by a bunch of kids. And because that program couldn't get it to where I wanted it, I wrote a story around it and put it in the book for perpetuity. Somewhere in the future. It's there if somebody has the wherewithal. I gave you A to Z, I gave you all the research, all of it is in that book.
[00:21:32] Speaker A: You know, it's powerful. And you know what? The funding should be there. And if there's a way to resurface the request for the funding, because I'll tell you, what happens in our society is when we're told 18 is the magic number and you are now an adult, it's like well, what the heck happened yesterday before my birthday hit, you know, the hour and the minute I was born, I was a child, and then overnight I turn into an adult. Like, like the magic wand.
That's not helpful. And what, what happens is then, then it's defined by, to us, the stereotypical, the way you're supposed to act as an adult. And, and basically what society tells us is, all right, now, you put the child away.
Don't listen to child. There's no more play, there's no more fun. Now you got to take life seriously. And we end up changing as people and we start ignoring the child in us. And that's where a lot of the depression and suicide and all this stuff. Because now this crazy world, if we're so damn serious about it, we've got to have some kind of humor and fun in life to break the monotony of this overwhelm. So we've got to bring, start saying yes to that inner child because he's, he's still in us.
[00:22:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: You know, so thank, thank you for, for writing the book.
You know, perhaps timing's everything and, and perhaps if you bring out that idea again for funding and get out of that semi retirement. Tom. And may, perhaps, perhaps people are ready for it who have the money.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: Also an ulterior motive to writing it, to tell the story, to say, because I wrote in there, I, I wrote specifically one of the chapters to the 10 wealthiest men in the country and said, and I, I, I talked to each one of them in that chapter saying what we could do. So, yeah, if it happens, I come out of retirement because it hasn't changed. Our kids today are in more of anxious, depressive environment and the suicide rate is just off the charts and their use of drugs and, and substances is just not because they don't know any better. Like you said, society says this.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: And this is what I become because I don't know any better.
[00:23:54] Speaker A: No. And so I mean, and you used, you look at it and it used to be once the child leaves that left the home, he or she doesn't come back because they go through that route of the marriage and now, you know, you have them staying at home 25, 30, 30 years old because the cost of living is such that finding a home by being able to buy a home on your own, it's.
Everything's priced us out of being able to be independent and where we want to go, and it's happening at a later date. My, My oldest son's 23. He's got autism Spectrum disorder. And he thinks everybody's ahead of him and he'll never be independent, never able to buy a home, earn enough money to buy a home. What a crappy feeling at 23 to feel that way, you know, so I'm trying to work optimistically and really live out of abundance rather than scarcity. And it's a lot of things he says I agree with, but I don't want to agree with him out loud because we gotta keep his optimism up there. But yes, I don't know, you know. Well, you know, we're at the point where I know that the audience has certainly captured the essence of Tom La Grave and they're going to want to get in touch with you, Tom. And here's what, how, how you can get in touch with Tom. Everybody go to his website. It's the honor H O N O R Bound B O U N D academy.org the honorbound academy.org you'll find every platform he's on and be able to get in touch with him and be able to have a call with him.
So definitely do that, please.
Well, you know, Tom, I've got two final questions for you. You ready?
The first one, you're sitting in your happy space, happy place and you're sitting down with 7 to 10 year old Tom Lagrave and you want to give him advice about life. What are you going to tell him?
[00:25:46] Speaker B: Follow your bliss.
The saying is carpe diem, seize the day, do not hesitate, go forth and conquer.
Because I wasn't going to listen to anything yet except for something like that.
Love that.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Switch. Switching hats. Now you're sitting down with young Tom Legra, the young businessman, young entrepreneur and you've got some business advice you'd like to share with him. What are you going to tell him?
[00:26:13] Speaker B: Yeah, and this is the critical essence. This was the error in my. If there, you know what, no regrets. But there were errors made and one of them was I am clinically sound, I am clinically capable. That's the micro I can sit across and alter somebody's life, but I can't. I'm not a CEO.
I did not stay somewhere long enough to work my way up, to have the ability to know what is expected of. If you're the, the CEO of the or the director, I lack that skill set. And that's the piece I would say early on, instead of going to get your information, I went into the prison system, child protective services with the development disabled with, you know, the. I worked at a retirement home. I wanted to learn all of that. But I could have done that in one place and worked my way up to running the place.
That's what I would say. Understand, there's a micro and a macro, and if you want to be the boss, you need to get both skill sets.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: Love it. Great advice.
Well, Tom, I want to thank you for not only coming on, but coming in, coming into my life. And again, Jasmine, thanks for assisting with that. I want you to suggest, stay who you are. Don't change.
Celebrate the.
The. The success you've done with the five and a half years. What. What's the. What's the.
The date? Do you have a certain date that you celebrate?
[00:27:55] Speaker B: October 17th.
[00:27:56] Speaker A: All right, October 17th, we're all going to celebrate with you.
[00:28:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:01] Speaker A: All right. So keep doing what you're doing. You're a great human being and so thankful you came into our lives.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: You've been great. Thank you for this opportunity. I appreciate it. And your guests.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: My pleasure. And our pleasure.
Everybody out there, please take care of yourselves.
Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe. Subscribe and give us a review. To help others find it, I'd like you to answer this question.
Are you living the life you want to live, or are you living the life others want you to live? I'd like you to think about that for a second because I strongly suggest you live the life you want to live. If you want to learn more about what I stand for and my services and how I'm able to help many men get out of their own way, please go to my website at www.prophetcompassion.com.
feel free to also email me at drewrophetcompassion.com I'd love to have a conversation with you. Take care of yourself and choose to write your own story instead of letting others write it for you.
