Don't Waste Your Pain

CONTENT WARNING: This episode discusses r*pe, the murder of a young woman, and the s*xual assault of a child. Please take care while listening. A twelve-year-old girl is stopped on the street by a man asking directions to the train station. A father sits on his couch between detective interviews on the morning his daughter is murdered. Neither of them chose what happened next. Both of them chose w...

Her father came home from the hospital in a wheelchair, telling his twelve-year-old daughter he sometimes wished he had died. Growing up in an immigrant family and later becoming the only Asian kid in her school, Becky Yee learned early how to survive feeling different, adapt fast, and keep moving. She went on to become a fourth-degree black belt in her father’s favorite martial art, travel the wo...

Dr. Buck Blodgett’s 19-year-old daughter, Jessie, was raped and murdered by someone she knew and trusted. In the face of every parent’s worst nightmare, Buck made a choice that would shape the rest of his life: to forgive. Not to excuse, forget, or release accountability, but to refuse to let hatred own what was still his. In this powerful conversation, Buck shares the phone call every parent fear...

Kyla Mitsunaga is the kind of guest who can wear an emotional support headband, talk about death, dementia, money, shame, sensuality, and family systems, and somehow make the whole room feel lighter, and she did exactly that on DWYP. A Harvard-trained, award-winning former professor, Kyla is also a third culture kid born and raised in Hong Kong, and she knows what it feels like to not belong. She...

Some people grow up comfortable with death, darkness, and the parts of life most families keep locked in a back room. Derek Peterson grew up mowing cemeteries, lowering caskets, and sitting in mausoleums in winter. No secrets. No shame. Just life and death, held together. That ease with the hard stuff became the foundation for 30 years of international work with children carrying stories far too h...

Mai's story holds the kind of pain that teaches a child to go quiet, a stranger who turned her trust against her, the year of silence that almost broke her, the parents who loved her but could not give her what she needed, and the inheritance of a family that crossed an ocean to be safe. But this conversation is not only about what was done to her. It is about what we reach for when the people who...

Meenakshi’s story moves through the kind of pain most people never imagine surviving, the murder of her father and grandfather in a terrorist attack, the silence that can surround grief, the pressure to keep going when everything has fallen apart, and the ache of growing up in a culture that told her darker skin made her less worthy. But this conversation is not only about what happened to her. It...

He was thirteen years old, dying of cancer, and he turned down the pain medication so he could stay awake with the people he loved. That is not a metaphor. That is what Carson Sipe actually did. His mother, Carrie, tells it straight — the knee removal, the infection, the hospice bed wheeled into the living room that Carson refused to sit in because, as he put it, why can't I just die on the couch....

Don't Waste Your Pain is a movement disguised as a podcast. The world lacks places to tell the truth about pain, so this show addresses realities like rape, murder, illness, and loss without flinching or sensationalizing. Hosted by JT Trepanier, the conversations anchor on four core pillars: death, illness, sensuality, and mothering. This is not a self-help podcast offering fixes or five-step...