Dana De La Rosa: Removing the MaskDana De La Rosa: Removing the Mask
Struggle Well Podcast
Army veteran and musician Dana De La Rosa shares how years of hiding behind excellence, deployments and service gave way to honesty, post-traumatic growth and a new way of facing grief, shame and family struggle. The conversation highlights how peer support, small daily choices and shared language helped her family walk through suicide, cancer and ongoing challenges together.
47:08•29 Jul 2026
Removing the Mask: Dana De La Rosa on Shame, Service and Post-Traumatic Growth
Episode Overview
- Hiding behind achievement, service and busyness can mask deep pain, but those cracks eventually show up in relationships, parenting and mental health.
- Peer-to-peer programmes like Warrior PATHH give space for honesty without labels or diagnosis, helping people name the beliefs driving their lives.
- Post-traumatic growth is an ongoing practice, not a finish line, and it can change how families walk through later crises like suicide and serious illness.
- Small, consistent actions—rest, self-compassion, honest conversation and "emptying a rock out of your rucksack"—create room for genuine presence with loved ones.
- Comparing traumas blocks connection; what matters is how experiences shape thoughts, feelings and actions, not whether they seem "big enough" on paper.
“I had a really great mask on while I was dying inside. And you can do that for a while really well. And at some point, things start spilling out of your own rucksack.”
Experience the emotional and inspiring tales of recovery through the story of Army veteran and musician Dana De La Rosa, who shares how a "really great mask" almost cost her everything. On the surface, Dana was the model soldier and high-achiever, praised for her work ethic, deployments, and even bodybuilding shows.
Behind the scenes, she says, "I had a really great mask on while I was dying inside." The conversation traces her journey from a responsibility-heavy childhood on a Wisconsin farm to an unexpected career in the Army band, where she lived on a constant "roller coaster" of highs and lows.
Dana talks candidly about being pregnant in a combat zone, being labelled a "combat slut", and carrying unbearable shame while still trying to make meaning out of a soldier’s suicide and her own sense of failure. Her breaking point comes later, when repeated deployments stop and life quiets down in Arizona.
With a struggling marriage and a nine-year-old son expressing suicidal thoughts, Dana realises, "maybe you need to start with yourself." That decision leads her to Warrior PATHH and Boulder Crest, where the peer-to-peer model and the language of post-traumatic growth help her finally drop the mask and speak honestly about the pain she’d hidden for years.
She also shares how these tools helped her and her husband walk through the suicide of a close friend and their son Gustavo’s rare liver cancer, complete with a gratitude board on the hospital door and a Make-A-Wish trip to Madrid that Gustavo now remembers as a positive turning point.
Throughout, Dana keeps it real: no magic fixes, just small, consistent choices like rest, honesty, and "emptying a rock out of your rucksack" so there’s more room for the people you love. If you’re tired of pretending you’re fine while you’re falling apart, could Dana’s story be the nudge you need to take off your own mask?
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