Leave the light on with Tammy Flake

In this powerful conversation, Tammy Flake sits down with Army veteran Daniel Conely to talk about service, deployment, injuries, loss, identity, and the long road toward healing. Daniel shares his deeply personal journey through military service, physical injuries, divorce, depression, and a time when he questioned his own worth. He also talks about how veteran organizations, friendships, woodwor...

In this deeply personal episode of Leave the Light On , Tammy Flake sits down with Brooke Quinn, a registered nurse and mother, who shares a story of unimaginable loss—and the strength it has taken to keep moving forward. Brooke experienced suicide loss first as a teenager when her best friend, died after struggling with bullying and mental health challenges. Years later, Brooke lost her husband,...

When You Think It’s the End, It Might Be the Beginning What happens when the life you thought you were going to live suddenly changes? In this episode of Leave the Light On , Tammy Flake sits down with James “Jim” Logan, a 62-year-old Ironman athlete, author, husband, and cancer survivor living with a stage-four metastatic colorectal cancer diagnosis. Jim shares what happened when doctors told him...

When Someone Says “How Are You?” — Ask Them How They Really Are In this powerful episode of Leave the Light On , Tammy Flake sits down with Utah media personality and suicide-prevention advocate Brandy Vega , founder of Promise to Live. Brandy shares a deeply personal story of surviving a suicide attempt at 12, serving in the military and working in news media, and ultimately facing the unimaginab...

In this deeply personal episode of Leave the Light On , Tammy Flake opens up about a tool from Heroes Haven that changed the way she understands trauma, responsibility, and shame: the Responsibility Matrix . Tammy breaks down the difference between an accident, a choice, and something intentional —and the emotional response that belongs with each: grief, remorse, or guilt . Most importantly, she e...

In this episode of Leave the Light On , Tammy Flake takes an honest look at the statistics surrounding suicide, with a particular focus on veterans. Tammy breaks down the gender paradox of suicide , the role of lethal means, why firearms are such a significant factor among veterans, and the alarming gap between veterans who need support and those actually connected to care. She also discusses mili...

Time Can Save a Life | Building Hope Before the Crisis What if the most powerful tool in suicide prevention isn't having the perfect words—but simply creating enough time for hope to return? In this deeply personal episode of Leave the Light On , Tammy Flake shares her own experience of reaching a breaking point and the plan that helped her find her way back. Drawing from her journey as an Ir...

What if the greatest gift you could give your children isn't money, success, or even security—but knowing without question that they matter? In this episode of Leave the Light On , Tammy Flake shares the intentional practices that have shaped her family through trauma, military life, and the challenges of raising children in today's world. From journaling and family councils to teaching...

In this episode, Tammy Flake steps outside the familiar landscape of VA clinics and prescription pads to explore the wide, largely unknown world of alternative healing available to veterans and military families — much of it free, and almost all of it something she's personally experienced before recommending it. She starts with hyperbaric oxygen therapy, correcting the common image of a cram...

In this episode, Tammy Flake tells a story she's referenced before but never fully explained: what she means when she says the military almost killed her. It isn't about combat, and it isn't primarily about suicidal ideation, though she speaks to that honestly too. It's about nearly bleeding to death — twice, after two separate childbirths — inside a military medical system tha...

In this episode, Tammy Flake steps away from the interview chair to make an announcement: she's running for National Commander-in-Chief of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. An Iraq War veteran, peer support facilitator, and suicide prevention advocate, Tammy lays out why she's putting her name forward, what the VFW actually does at the post level versus what most people — veterans included —...

In this episode, Tammy Flake steps back from her usual format to share what happened inside a room in Golden, Colorado — a three-day gathering called Organizers in Dialogue that brought together roughly eighty people from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum, with one shared agreement: they were there to listen, not to convince. Tammy walks through what unfolded over those three da...

In this episode, Tammy Flake steps away from interviews and campaign talk to share the private work — the books, the research, and the quiet commitments that underpin everything else she does. She starts with The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, and how it gave her language for something her own body had been trying to tell her for years through recurring shingles and sustained, suppre...

This episode tells the story of Sloan — a Marine, a former military mortician who spent years receiving and preparing the bodies of fallen service members, and a man living with traumatic brain injury and PTSD after losing three brothers-in-arms to suicide. Tammy met Sloan through Heroes Haven, and this episode walks through the night his healing wasn't enough to hold — the crisis in the gara...

In this episode, Tammy Flake makes the case for what she believes is one of the most powerful tools in healing from trauma — not therapy, not medication, not a hotline, but another human being who has actually lived it. She unpacks the difference between peer-to-peer support and clinical or scripted care, and why people who are struggling most, especially veterans and first responders, can tell in...

Major General Jeff Burton spent 37 years in an Army uniform — enlisting in 1982, commanding the 1457th Engineer Combat Battalion through the Iraq invasion, and later serving as Utah's Adjutant General over 7,500 soldiers and airmen. He brought all 450 of his soldiers home. But his hardest deployment happened in his own living room, when his teenage son died by suicide ten months before Burton...

In this solo episode, host Tammy Flake opens up her own toolkit — the practices and perspectives that carried her from a dark place to a life she loves. She introduces the idea of the "paradigm shift," using her own journey from a wary teenage recruit to someone who now trusts the process, to explain how our sense of what's safe and possible can move more than we think. Tammy walks...