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Welcome back to Not Alone with Melissa Sue Methven, the sacred space where we break the silence around our struggles and reclaim healing through truth.
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Today's episode is for every man who's ever been told to man up and every woman who's watched him carry it all without ever being asked how he's doing.
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My guest is Dr Trevor Nichols, an orthodontist, husband, father and someone who knows firsthand the invisible weight men are carrying in today's world.
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We're unpacking what it really means to be a man when no one ever taught you how to feel.
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We talk about the emotional costs of being the provider, the father wound that silently shapes men, and the burnout crisis in dentistry and beyond.
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Dr Trevor opens up about his journey with breathwork, the tools he's found for nervous system regulation and how he's learning to be more present for his family, his practice and himself, for his family, his practice and himself.
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This conversation isn't just for men.
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It's for the women who love them, the kids who are watching them and the cycle breakers ready to raise emotionally whole families.
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So take a breath and settle in, because today we're diving deep into a conversation that just might be the lifeline someone needs.
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So welcome, trevor.
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Dr Trevor Nichols, I'm so honored to have you here today and I have no doubt our audience will love your story and what you have to share today.
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Thank you, Amel.
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I'm super grateful to be here.
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I even, like, started feeling a little emotional about your intro.
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It just what you're doing.
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It's so impactful and I feel like it's such a great sacred space that I'll say for myself that I need and you're bringing light in and just a breath.
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You say take a breath, and I'm thinking I'm taking a breath real quick, but it's going to be an emotional journey, I think, for me today, which is a great thing, but happy to share anything and just grateful for you and all you're doing and for all the people that are just there to to help us navigate life the best that we can.
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Yes, thank you.
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Yeah, I'd love to start like who who was Trevor as a young boy, like who were you and the process of you wanting to become a dentist and, um, yeah, just start us there.
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Yeah, so I um pretty much born and raised in Arizona, um athlete for sure, so grew up playing sports really big into competitive soccer young, and then football later um track and field as well.
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But academics were always really important to me.
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Um school always came fairly easy for me because I knew the importance of it and from a young age probably like 10 or 11, I knew I wanted to do ortho, actually super duper young Part of it.
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Through my own experience with a few orthodontists I knew that were just great people and I felt like it was a great avenue.
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I love art and so it was like kind of the perfect combination between art and medicine and I felt called to do it really.
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And I feel that's a blessing because so many people go through life not really knowing what they should do and I feel like that's really hard.
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I have a twin brother named Travis and he struggled a lot trying to find his purpose in life and I feel it was a blessing for me to understand and know what I wanted to do early.
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That helped me just like go get it, you know, go get it.
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And I think part of the motivation there was helping people for sure maximizing my potential, but even more so like fulfilling the calling that I felt like I was meant to accomplish with my life, which really is about serving people to the best of my capability, and that's brought a lot of growth, but it's also brought hardships and struggles, but ultimately life is such a journey that I'm grateful to be living, grateful to be where I am.
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Um, but uh, I I knew again early I wanted to do dentistry and just kind of went straight through.
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I went to ASU um, really really focused there, worked full time as well and got married pretty young.
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So my wife and I met in high school.
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Um, I knew her, uh, I met her when she was eight I was about 10 at the time so I was her first kiss, which is super fun story.
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But, um, so we got married pretty young, had kids pretty young.
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So I went through ASU um, worked full time and went to school.
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Um, thankfully did well there.
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I graduated valedictorian from ASU and went to dental school, was class president.
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We had twins that were about four months when I started dental school.
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So that was a really tough year or two.
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Then, after dental school, did residency in Arizona.
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I've been working here ever since and then we opened a practice about a year ago.
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Our own practice had a partnership previous, which we'll get into, I'm sure.
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But here we are and life is crazy and busy and amazing and hard at the same time.
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Yeah, wow, that's beautiful.
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I love that.
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That you met your wife.
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She was so great and I personally got to meet her and she is just such a light and you two together.
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You still feel that love.
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You know that love is still there and that's the best part of my life.
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by far is our relationship and it's gotten me through probably the toughest of times is having her, I think, by my side and what she's done, which I'd love to talk about some today, things that she's done to support me that have helped me through some of the struggles of dentistry and business ownership and fatherhood and life.
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She has been the one, I think, to carry me through 90% of it and help me with the tools I need to get there.
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Yeah, but that was good that you were willing to receive that you know and listening.
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Yeah, that's so good, I'd love to get into that.
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So talk about you know, when you first got started you said you joined Elan with another practice and, um, I hear it was quite a large practice, right yeah big practice.
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So, um, I joined a practice gosh, it's been almost 10 years ago, Um, when I came out of residency very big, very world renowned practice, Um, the owner of the practice was.
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He lectured all over the world and very, very like um, top line orthodontics, you know, very, very highly cosmetic and very detailed.
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And that was hard for me at first because I was his first associate he'd ever had and, um, you know the patients there were there for him not for me, for sure and that was really hard because I felt like here I am, I'm new out of school, I'm like gung ho, we just did 12 years of school and spent all this money on it.
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I'm like ready to go help people and nobody wanted to see me, you know, and that was really hard that first year.
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Um, and nobody wanted to see me, you know, and that was really hard that first year, Feeling like I needed to be him, and I lost myself a little bit along the way, like just feeling like I needed to be him or need to be a certain person for someone else, and so that was a journey that.
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I'm still recovering from, in a way, to be honest, almost like doubting your own skills?
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Yeah, for sure I could see that because, scott, my husband being a dentist as well, he had a few associates come in, you know, straight out of school and I could feel that they felt that like that confidence wasn't there and I think that's so important for new dentists to hear that because it's hard.
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They come in and they feel like they're going to have already you know, big lineup of of patients and people wanted to request them, but I I could tell that they felt hurt when the patient's like no, no, I only want.
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You know, scott, and you know you really do have to be so secure almost in knowing that you, you went to school, you have all the gifts, but it takes time to the reality of practice, right to be quicker at those skills, the crowns and you know, fillings and
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and so to almost.
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Um, you know, what would you recommend to?
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You know new grads that just start working to keep that confidence up, you know, and stop comparing themselves to someone that's been doing it probably for 10 years?
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yeah, you know I think some of that's impossible.
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I think we're going to compare and we still compare every day.
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I think for me, it's identifying when you're comparing and trying to set like flags in your mind to say, okay, I'm going to stop comparing myself and just being your genuine, authentic self.
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I think that's what connects us to people is just being open and vulnerable to being and helping them show who you are.
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And I think if you truly care and you open yourself up, it will come in time.
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But it does take time.
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And I think just knowing it's going to take time but it will get there, and being patient, yet taking the opportunities that are given to just really pour yourself into people, they'll see that eventually.
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And it may take a year or two years, but eventually there'll be people there that want to see you.
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And not that it's about you, it's about the feeling, the connection that you have.
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I mean life is really about relationships and connection and the more genuine those are, I think the more fulfilled we are, especially in our career.
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You know, um, dentistry is.
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It's a very sacred, like intimate space, right, You're in someone's body, like literally in someone's body, working with millimeters and it's.
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You know it can be overwhelming for patients, and so you understand their hesitancy for sure.
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But also you want opportunities to serve them and at the beginning, when no one wants to see you, that's hard because you're there ready to serve and people like, nope, not me, maybe the next person I want to be your Guinea pig, right, which you understand.
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But at the same time you want to serve.
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So that took time to kind of get through, um, and about a year later things were great.
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Um, the practice was just growing and growing and I started lecturing for other companies and that brought good things, but also like some imposter syndrome too.
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You know it's here I'm a couple of years into practice and lecturing to doctors who've been practicing for 20 years.
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Um, and that feeling was weird too, but also at the same time like I wanted to take those opportunities and be the best that I could, and also I felt that was part of my calling too is to help teach and the things that I had learned, to dispel those upon other people as much as I could.
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And so as time went on, the practice got busier.
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We did really well and kind of earning partnership was kind of the goal, um, but as happens sometimes very, very common in dentistry, right.
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It's like, you know, the partnership gets pushed and it's like one year turns into two years to three years to four years to five years without things happening.
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And that really destroyed me in some ways, right, because I felt like it wasn't good enough.
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You know, I'd been putting everything, literally my whole life, into the practice without feeling like I was earning that partnership, um.
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So finally we kind of made things happen, um, and then the the practice was sold to a corporation, um, and that wasn't the plan, right.
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So for me, I felt like all of the time and years that I had spent, um, growing this and having it really be mine, this was my life, like I'd poured into my future and I felt like everything kind of was.
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I felt like I had no future anymore.
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You know when that happened.
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But I also felt a con Okay, now it's time for me to go do my own thing, and that was its own journey.
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But I felt like I needed that for me, not for anybody else, but I needed that for myself to get that confidence back.
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It sounds to me like you weren't aligning anymore with their vision.
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Totally Right.
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Totally, and so your heart was like this is not aligning anymore.
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I mean, part of it was like I love the people, I love the team, I love the practice, but I saw it was happening Um, and it didn't align with me anymore, you know so almost like the heart was being taken out Right.
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And that's why I didn't want to sell to.
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But yeah, I mean nothing wrong with big corporate.
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Sometimes it comes in sure of a good time to alleviate, you know, the heavy load.
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But I was approached by a lot of big corporate companies as well when we sold and I was like no, that's going to take away the heart and luckily I found somebody a great dentist yeah, there's a difference.
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Yeah, there is a difference but I feel you know, so we, we left and it was really hard at the time.
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We left and, um, a little bit of a kind of a push out from from the corporate situation and, um, when we opened we got sued for non-compete still going through that litigation right now and it's been a couple of years and been really hard to do a scratch startup practice while going through litigation, draining and well, I'm sure it's just.
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I know I'm glad you bring up litigation because I know too many dentists, my friends are going through that and personally we went through that.
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Scott was being sued and it was a seven-year battle and I saw how draining it was to deal with lawyers, lawyers, non, nonstop, I mean in between patients.
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You know at times he'd be late for patients because he's just like you know, it's all so consuming and I think you know sometimes with both sides they feel there's a hurt, right, there's a pain, there's a loss, almost like a mistrust, but at the same time, if it doesn't align anymore, why fight for it to be together?
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You know, in almost seeing it as the monetary right, it was working out monetarily but you're no longer aligning in your visions.
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So let that go totally right.
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And I saw that so much, so many times.
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I begged for us to just let go, because I saw so much happiness and and and I truly honestly, for me, the best thing that I ever did after my husband passed was to let that go and sign those paperwork and give it all.
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Yeah, because I I knew in my heart that I'd be okay, I'd find a way yeah and it's been three years and I have found a way.
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You know that.
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I think that's such a great story and unfortunately, so many of us go through that, as I don't know if it's a dental thing, but it's like gosh.
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Every other dentist I hear of it's going through some type of patient or, like you said, it's going to happen.
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You start business together, but sometimes your life changes right, so why bring in lawyers?
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I mean, ultimately, our lawyers won.
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They're the only ones.
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I mean, ultimately, our lawyers won, they're the only ones that won.
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Yeah, our lawyers won.
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They were like great, keep fighting, you know.
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So I do hope that less people are, you know, going to shine away and want to attack the dentist for something that went wrong or the partnership.
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Just let it go, yeah, and be open to it, you know.
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And don't waste your money, yeah.
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Or your life, or your energy, or your life, yes, your energy.
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It sucks the energy out of us it does, emotionally, I mean even more than monetarily, which it's crazy expensive.
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The amount of energy and joy it steals from you is, I don't think we under.
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We didn't comprehend that beforehand for sure, and now it's just like oh my gosh, we.
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That's the part we just want to let go of, as well as the emotion, cause that the money is the one thing, but the emotion and the life altering pressure, I guess there is way worse than the monetary stuff, but that's that sucks, and you see that in marriages, divorce right oh my gosh, when they fight and fight, fight and just just let it be.
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Let it go, it's not working out exactly.
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Let them go, yep, so I will pray for you, for that you know I will pray right there with you, keep praying yes, yes, absolutely.
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You guys deserve that piece and uh and I've seen your beautiful office thank you in queen creek and it is stunning and I've been um just such an honor when I came and did breath work for your staff and you have created something very, very unique.
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Thank you.
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The culture and it just shows the work that you've put into yourself.
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And I'd love to know, in that process of you speaking and starting, were you already integrating anything to for you that self-care Cause you had a young family right, so how did you navigate?
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How did your wife help you?
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How did you navigate all of that, even from the start?
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Yeah, I think for me, um, I found fitness, super young, to be a great outlet for me mentally, um, and I've kind of would put some of the mental pressures and just explode them physically.
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But that only gets you so far, you know.
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I think that that allows you to release some of the stress and energy in a physical way that for me I don't know that I would have, I would have made it without that, truth be told I think that for me, the physical aspect of releasing some of it emotionally, um, is like something that I have found to be, um, very important.
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For me, very important is the physical aspect.
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The second part is just finding a way to release some of the emotions and just to talk.
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For me to talk and sometimes journal, but for me, like talking things out, is very healing.
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So, having great relationships in my life, like with my wife and some close friends because, you know, small business ownership, dentistry, can be super lonely, you know, and there aren't a lot of people that understand, kind of what we go through, I guess, and so finding people that do understand and communicating with them has been really, really helpful for me, and then having someone like my wife that is just there to listen but, even more important, to cheerlead.
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You know, because we, in our comparison, or, you know, in us, in dentistry, we, we have an expectation, I think, on ourselves and from patients that like things have to be perfect and they need to walk in the office and it needs to have this perfect atmosphere and they need to be comfortable when really, in some ways, your job is to like you want to help them but you have to kind of hurt them to help them every time they're in the office.
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And that's hard right, cause you you've mentioned this before that we take on their energy, a lot of it, right, their bad experiences, their, their stress, their trauma, and we have to kind of be on for them all day, right.
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You're taking that on because there's so much fear I mean.
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I know working in the office too.
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People are coming in, they're yelling, they're you know, they're angry at you, but it's because under that anger there's so much fear.
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And even at times when I'd work on kids, I'd have to tell the parents to go sit in the sitting room because they were projecting their fears and the child was you know, and so you.
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I know we take that on, but if you never take time to kind of release that, so I think for dentists that's a big one, and I'm still learning that honestly, and it's it comes in waves.
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For me it's like a rollercoaster.
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You know, even my whole journey in dentistry and orthodontics has been a bit of a rollercoaster, where we have highs and lows all day long.
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The emotional highs of like delivering a great result and having someone see that and their life changed through the process of ortho is like such a fulfilling thing that can't be matched for me in my life.
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No drug or anything like that could be what that gives for me and a fulfillment to be able to do that for someone.
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At the same time there's there's as many lows as that too.
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So it's just this crazy emotional balance every day.
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And so, yeah, we have to find a way to regulate that, and so for me, definitely the physical aspect of that through working out has been amazing.
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The mental aspect of just releasing some of it through talking and then, more recently, spending time, quiet time I mean the breath work you did for us.
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That's been a new journey for me and I.
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Our life is so busy and that's the other part about, about dentistry and ortho.
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It's like, you know, we go from having our team meetings in the morning, being on for our team and bringing the energy and then bringing the energy to every single patient and as orthodontists we'll see anywhere from 50 to a hundred patients a day, and so you're, you have to be on it, so you're on stage all day long and then you go home and you're on stage with your kids and your wife and it's it can be exhausting.
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So finding the time to let yourself feel the feels through like breath work and then try and finding a way to feel them and allow yourself to feel them and then try and focus on releasing them.
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One thing that's been a little bit of a struggle for me in starting the breath work is like picking one thing, because sometimes when I sit down and I do the meditation, I have five things or 10 things that I feel like I need to release.
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So it's like I'm going to pick one today and I'm going to release that and I'm going to try the next, the next day, and the more we do that the better that I feel.
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But I also feel when I'm not doing that it culminates and I feel like, okay, if I just live for the weekend and I'm just ready to do that on Friday, monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday are so hard and by Thursday, I'm like ready to explode.
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And so finding a way to do it every day, I think is so important, and the further that I get with my career, especially now in ownership, the more I'm finding the importance of that.
00:19:57.938 --> 00:20:23.667
You know, and thankfully my wife is on board where she's like she wants that for me, she recognizes its importance and so she'll give me the space to do that um, and she encourages it, say, hey, you need like take, take your 45 minutes to do your meditation when you get home to help and then reset so that you can then be present for me and the kids, because I would find, if I just came straight home and and tried to do all the things with them, that it was really hard.
00:20:23.667 --> 00:20:26.825
You know, it was really hard for me to keep that energy up?
00:20:26.845 --> 00:20:27.487
yeah, for sure.
00:20:27.487 --> 00:20:29.362
So that's me too.
00:20:29.362 --> 00:20:32.932
When I go to work and then I come home and they all want me, I'm like, I'm almost like.
00:20:32.932 --> 00:20:37.392
You know, it's a sensory overload, we're tapped out.
00:20:37.392 --> 00:20:39.438
So I love that you're taking.
00:20:39.518 --> 00:20:49.482
You said 45 minutes still learning, yeah and still learning through that and every day is different, um, but I'm fighting for me, like my morning routine, right, and then my evening routine.
00:20:49.482 --> 00:20:50.888
I have to do it every day.
00:20:50.888 --> 00:20:53.641
I have to, and part of that morning routine is not just working out.
00:20:53.641 --> 00:20:56.828
I do a little bit of spiritual work for myself in the morning.
00:20:56.828 --> 00:21:01.188
I do the physical work as well and then I love to like listen to something like a podcast.
00:21:01.188 --> 00:21:03.722
But I also find that sometimes that's not good for me.
00:21:03.722 --> 00:21:17.882
The podcast stuff sometimes I can't listen to because I'm already at max, like even in the morning sometimes, where the pressure I already feel if I listen to a podcast that tells me how to do something better, I'm just adding more weight to my backpack where I'm like I can't handle more weight today.
00:21:17.882 --> 00:21:28.980
So I have to kind of really understand where I'm at and that day what I need, and then choosing the things I need throughout the day to help regulate those things and then try and just start fresh the next day.
00:21:28.980 --> 00:21:31.695
But it's a journey and I know everyone goes through that.
00:21:31.695 --> 00:21:40.586
Right, we all have different hardships and not that dentistry is unique in some of those ways, but it is unique in a way that more of a struggle and there's a higher suicide rate.
00:21:40.586 --> 00:21:42.332
And it's like, why is that Right?
00:21:42.332 --> 00:21:44.605
We have to understand, like, why is that the case?
00:21:44.605 --> 00:21:47.633
Um, I think it's all these things we've talked about.
00:21:47.633 --> 00:21:53.976
I think it's all these things we've talked about.
00:21:53.976 --> 00:21:56.373
I think it's the sensory overloads, it's us taking on the patients, it's us having an expectation that we want to be perfect.
00:21:56.373 --> 00:22:00.429
But, um, what I try and remind myself of every day is, although I want to be perfect, I'm never going to be and there's a reason they call it our practice.
00:22:00.429 --> 00:22:01.650
It's our practice, not our perfect.
00:22:01.650 --> 00:22:03.470
And I say that to myself every day.
00:22:03.470 --> 00:22:07.251
I'm like it is my practice, not my perfect, and I'm going to help myself to perfection.
00:22:07.271 --> 00:22:14.255
I think all of us do, too, in dentistry and medicine Like we feel like we have to be perfect all the time and we just can't.
00:22:14.255 --> 00:22:20.978
We can't do, we can't be the perfect doctor, the perfect leader, the perfect business owner, the perfect father, the perfect husband.
00:22:20.978 --> 00:22:22.358
You can't do it all.
00:22:22.358 --> 00:22:28.630
You can't do it all all the time, and so doing your best is different than doing perfect.
00:22:28.630 --> 00:22:30.383
And that's hard to understand.
00:22:30.383 --> 00:22:31.548
What's good enough?
00:22:31.548 --> 00:22:37.048
And I feel like a lot of times we don't feel like it's ever good enough ever and I feel that every day, right, it's like it's still.
00:22:37.048 --> 00:22:40.525
There's still more I want to give, but only so many hours and so much energy you have in the day.
00:22:41.125 --> 00:22:46.055
So, finding a way to be complacent with some of that in a good way, where you're not being lazy.
00:22:46.055 --> 00:22:49.723
But I think the key for me has been again chatting with my wife about it.
00:22:49.723 --> 00:22:54.429
She'll let me know, she'll help me to say hey, this is where you're doing well, this is where you're not doing well.
00:22:54.429 --> 00:22:56.179
Um, these are things you need to focus on.
00:22:56.179 --> 00:22:57.162
The other things you're doing great.
00:22:57.162 --> 00:23:03.765
But even sometimes just having somebody to be your cheerleader for you when you feel that pressure, it takes so much of the weight off.
00:23:03.765 --> 00:23:07.809
That I feel like is so important having cheerleaders in our life, because sometimes we're our own worst enemy.
00:23:07.809 --> 00:23:15.932
We say the worst things to ourselves when we should be our own cheerleader, but sometimes it takes us to find somebody outside to cheerlead us, to keep us going.
00:23:16.339 --> 00:23:17.707
Yeah, that's so beautiful.
00:23:17.707 --> 00:23:23.001
It sounds like you're becoming more and more self-aware right and be like, okay, what do I need today?
00:23:23.001 --> 00:23:28.227
And it sounds also with your wife the communication is there, the check-ins you know, yeah, so important.
00:23:28.267 --> 00:23:30.990
The check-ins and the support on both sides.
00:23:30.990 --> 00:24:13.330
Right, it sounds like you want to be so present for your family, so you're recognizing when, okay, you went straight home, you couldn't fully be there, the way you wanted to show up for your family, so that 45 minutes after work to take for yourself and I've realized that too for myself when I do my morning routine everything else flows better and I've actually been telling my kids now be like, okay, I am asking for a favor, when every time you go, wake up, do a gratitude prayer or do uh just just something like a meditation, a little prayer, just two minutes, say something and then to yourself like uh, and then at night I want you to release and forgive yourself, because sometimes they're so hard on themselves.
00:24:13.330 --> 00:24:24.842
And I said I at night because then it it impacts if you go to bed and you're like I know my kids ruminate on what they've done and they feel so bad because they'll be I'm sorry, mom, or this and that, and they tell me right before bed.
00:24:24.902 --> 00:24:34.645
You know, I said I want you to learn to forgive yourself every night before you go to bed and then, when you wake up, instead of going running to the tv or running to something, say one thing.
00:24:34.645 --> 00:24:43.174
So I've been trying that this summer to get them out you know, yeah, yeah, and I think it's important because it's you're showing up for yourself.
00:24:43.174 --> 00:24:50.932
But look how the ripple effect in your, for your wife, your relationship, how many years you've been together now, yeah, 15 years.
00:24:51.259 --> 00:24:52.324
We've been married 15 years.
00:24:52.365 --> 00:24:56.288
Married 15 years and then your two beautiful children as well.
00:24:56.288 --> 00:24:58.126
Look at the ripple effect there.
00:24:58.126 --> 00:25:07.483
I mean, I met you and you feel the unity, you feel the love and that wholeness that we all crave when we have a family.
00:25:07.483 --> 00:25:09.309
That's what we want, right, totally.
00:25:09.309 --> 00:25:15.612
But a lot of times it starts with working on us becoming self-aware of these limited beliefs.
00:25:15.612 --> 00:25:17.722
You know, actually I read something in a book.
00:25:17.722 --> 00:25:21.980
Uh, every time I go to sauna I bring in one of the books and I read.
00:25:21.980 --> 00:25:25.107
And there's one it said about limiting about beliefs.
00:25:25.107 --> 00:25:32.709
It said to journal your beliefs and then also journal your limiting beliefs and then start switching those around.
00:25:32.709 --> 00:25:40.176
You know, start rewriting them and becoming self-aware when those things come up, because those are blockages to get you to that growth.
00:25:40.176 --> 00:25:41.961
Yeah, right and um.
00:25:41.961 --> 00:25:43.224
So I really like that.
00:25:43.224 --> 00:25:44.386
I was like well, I need to do that.
00:25:44.548 --> 00:25:49.381
I think we I try, with the team, to talk about the culture, and that's such a huge part.
00:25:49.381 --> 00:25:50.547
We really have like three pillars.
00:25:50.547 --> 00:25:51.190
We try and stand.
00:25:51.190 --> 00:25:56.851
I want a patient experience, the second is the culture and the third is the results, and they all are what hold up the practice.
