The Trauma Therapist | Podcast The Military Series – Therapists Healing Vets Guy Crawford Macpherson, PhD Copyright © 2015 Guy Crawford Macpherson, PhD Publisher: The West Coast Trauma Project All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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CONTENTS

Foreword

1. Gerald Vest.

2. Don McCasland.

3. Larry Decker.

4. Edward Tick.

5. Tom Kavanaugh.

6. Rick Bata.

7. Charles Figley.

8. Kathy Platoni.

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Foreword

During my training in graduate school, several years ago, I was commuting several hours day. While in the car I’d often find myself thinking about my clients, wondering what I was doing, worrying if I was making any difference, and wishing I’d had a master therapist right there in the passenger seat mentoring me along the way. Essentially I wanted a podcast to fit that need.

During those long commutes I would listen to a variety of podcasts, with the central theme being people doing incredible things and living life on their own terms. At some point, right in the middle of a particular podcast episode, I decided I’d begin my own business and create my own podcast.

That was a few years ago, in 2014.

The following collection of transcripts you have in your hands was taken from interviews on my podcast, The Trauma Therapist Podcast. I have a fond place in my heart for military veterans. My father was one, and my brother, a Navy SEAL returned from Iraq with PTSD. I put this collection together because both the therapists and the veterans turned therapists I’ve interviewed here burn with a unique passion and are able to articulate that passion.

I wish to thank the therapists for their teaching, their passion and their inspiration. It has certainly inspired me along my journey to becoming a better human being.

My hope is that it will inspire you, as well.

Guy Macpherson, PhD

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1. Gerald Vest.

Alright Gerry, take a moment to share with us something personal about yourself to help us get to know you better.

Well, I’ve been interested in community mental health for a long time. I started a community mental health center in Pittsburgh in 1970 to ’74 where we started developing these integrative and holistic health practices. Unfortunately, around 1973 and ’74, communities started closing their mental hospitals because of the horrendous treatment that patients were receiving in these cuckoo’s nests. Many of us have seen “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and I also had a good opportunity to experience that firsthand as a consultant for the Athens Mental Hospital—called Athens Mental Health Center. So, I saw how horrendously these people were being treated by psychiatry. When they were dumped in the mental hospitals, they dumped them right into our community health services. Psychiatry came in with their labels and drugs, took over our community mental health systems in Pittsburgh where I was located, and just destroyed all the good health practices that we were doing in the community that I’m starting to get back with now as I’m working with these injured warriors. My experience goes back quite a ways, and I have personally experienced such pain and suffering by these psychiatric therapists who only desire to label and drug and code the patients. They came into our service centers, and we never did that before. We never labeled people, we never had to put them on record where they lose their privacy and confidentiality with the insurance industry, for example. So, I’m just honored to be able to work with these soldiers and their families. I was in the most remarkable health services center ever developed under John Fortunato’s leadership at Fort Bliss. I had the good fortune there to really work with over 200 injured warriors and families and see them recover successfully as long as they were receiving integrative and holistic health services intensively and extensively, Guy.

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Those two words have to go together. Extensively and intensively, because every injured warrior and family have been injured to the core. Intensively and extensively, their whole bodies, minds, spirits, emotions, their relationships are totally endangered.

You’re speaking my language, sir. Intense and extensive—let’s get into that in a short bit, but share with us something personal about you. Where are you living? Let’s hear something about that.

Ok, well I live in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I was brought here when I started the social work program in Rio Grande University in Ohio, and I was there three years. My kids started speaking Appalachian. Schools were suffering where we were, so we decided to search, and New Mexico State University brought me in to help develop their social work program at the undergraduate and graduate school levels. I had the good fortune to do that, and I learned about the community and grassroots, and I became a community organizer, organizing communities for right action, so to speak, to serve humanity, to serve people in a healthy, responsible, respectful way. I’ve been here 35 years. My wife passed in November. We’d been together 52 years. We had a wonderful time together, and we have two children. My daughter is a senior social worker in a Denver public school, with three grandchildren. My son is one of the finest Shakespearean actors in the country, and he’s leading Shakespeare by the Sea programs in Southern California right now.

Wow. Well, Gerry, thanks so much. There’s just a warmth in your voice that I’m certain comes out in the care you provide. Thanks so much for sharing that. Let’s use this to move to our next topic, which is the quote. This trauma therapist is about getting to know you, the Master Trauma Therapist, better. In order to do that, we want to get to know and hear what’s inspired you along your journey. What’s compelled you to pursue this path? So, share with us, if you will, a quote or a mantra, something that’s inspired or helped drive you on in your personal journey.

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I think I can identify at least two or three resources. One of them was Dr. Claudio Naranjo. He’s a great psychologist and psychiatrist. He wrote “The One Quest.” In the early ‘70s, we formed what’s called Seekers After Truth. The whole idea was to learn about how we can be the truth, so to speak. We can be what we are, but most of us are very confused. Who are we? What are we? Why are we here? We’re always asking those deep questions. We spent serious time together developing solutions and answers to those questions, and practicing meditation. During that period of time, I also wanted to learn the body and mind inside and out, so I became a Licensed Massage Therapist, so I could safely, carefully, and skillfully touch my clients and introduce them to safe, skillful, nourishing touch. That’s been one of my interests, because I just know that we have a society, right now, of untouchables, so to speak. Schools put up red flags, they punish children and others for touching one another, they put them out of school, they drug them. Our systems are so failed, Guy. There’s such a need for those of us who really care for humanity and social systems because they’re so broke. I had great opportunities to learn from the best people in the world— Claudio Naranjo and Oscar Ichazo, who was a great Bolivian scientist—and I was initiated into the Tibetan medicine through Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche, who is a Tibetan lama who first left Tibet when the Chinese came, or he wouldn’t be with us today. He went to India and then came to the United States and trained those of us who were in mental health who wanted to learn Tibetan medicine. I think that’s the key to my health practices—learning how to use all these different medicines and approaches to the multiple injuries that our soldiers and families are experiencing today.

So you talk about humanity. You talk about really developing touch, utilizing that in a safe way for the people who have been injured. Can you break it down for us? Get specific—how you utilize that, maybe how you came to realize that this was really important for you.

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That’s really a good question. I think it probably evolved with my family development. We came from a lot of kids. My brothers were all in the service also. Two of us were in the army and two in the navy—a submariner and a destroyer and a couple of army guys. You don’t do a lot of touching in the military, but I was with 17 brothers over in France for 17 months, and we learned to dance together. We were just growing up, like 19, 20, 21 years of age, and then coming home. I just feel like there was something really missing in our lives when we’re not touching, and I discovered when I was working with the mental health systems and YMCAs and other community organizations that people who are touched strive. People who aren’t, withdraw. It’s so obvious. Yesterday, I met with this soldier. It goes right back to their early development, too Guy, because, for example, he told me his mother detested him because she was raped and he was the result. He went into the army. He served seven years. He’s a good soldier, but when he came out he had no place to go. He turned homeless. No one was responding to him. He was just a lost soul. He didn’t have any place to go, and I noticed that people, when they’re kind of lost in time and space, we can just do some laying on of hands, just put our hands on their shoulders and breathe together and unite. We need to ground these energies, too that they come back with. They’re so stressed to the max that there’s no self­control or self­relaxation. They don’t really know how to survive these enormous stressors that hit every system. I’m so grateful for touch because soldiers trust somebody who touches them safely and skillfully. I love giving facial massages so they can feel their face after they come back from war because they’re so stressed. I love getting deep, and I have several partners now who come into our meetings. After we’re done, they’ll go get their body massaged, they’ll get their Reiki sessions, they’ll get their acupuncture. At the end of that day, they can’t remember when they’ve felt so good. These are really helpful tools, Guy. I don’t know how else to say it, but they’re so important to those of us serving our injured warriors and their families and teaching them to touch also. There’s a difference

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when you’re touched physically and you’re touched mentally and you’re touched emotionally. I consider spiritual touch as like a form of meditation that integrates the physical, mental, and emotional conditions of the human being. When we’re calming everything down and all the cells are working together—the nervous system, the senses, everything is working—they heal and recover. If they’re given drugs, pills, and psychic labels for life, we can count on them developing what I consider the VA shuffle.

Well, Gerry, I think you’re speaking some very important and profound words here, and I think a lot of our listeners who are beginning trauma therapists, or even therapists with more experience, are probably thinking, as I am, that touch and veterans somehow don’t go together. You know, it’s an oxymoron. I mean, just in and of itself, we’re constantly hearing how difficult it is for veterans to get the care they need, to get the therapy they need. Then, you’re bringing in this whole concept of touch, which is obviously so profound. How would you navigate that as well?

You’re absolutely right. It seems incongruent with the military because, if anything, there’s been a lot of bad touch going on in the military. A lot of that, Guy, has been because they haven’t gotten proper orientation early in their military careers. I served as the Fort Bliss stress management health promotion trainer for 25 years while I was teaching at New Mexico State University. Every week I’d go in and work with soldiers on introducing and having them come in with their couples and their families and teaching them how to touch. It is so important to touch and learn to touch because nobody’s teaching how to touch. They’re only setting up rules to have no touch. I see it as a holistic perspective because touch connects with the whole being. When we touch something, it’s our first basic human need requirement coming out into the world. We reached out. We couldn’t see. Our other senses are all in the developmental stages, so touch is the most important coming out thing we have. I kind of

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identify that with our soldiers coming home. When they’re coming out back into a society that has forgotten them and doesn’t know what to do with them, they don’t have any kind of serious plan for their health except drugs, labels, and not the proper resources. We returned 50 percent of our injured warriors, at the Fort Bliss R&R Center, back fit for duty the first two years we were in operation. It was just remarkable because every soldier, 40 hours a week for six months, received intensive touch, massage, acupuncture, Reiki therapy, yoga, therapeutic outings, the whole works to help this heal and recover and restore this veteran. It worked, but then the drugs started coming in. The prescribers started coming into the center. I was coordinating water polo—and hey, Guy, there’s a good example of touch—these guys were wrestling with each other for the ball, and it was more to get that touch and wrestling and that physical contact with the brothers they love so much. Literally, you could see a group hug going on. We didn’t blow any whistles.

That sounds awesome. Your experience and these stories are just coming out, and I think everyone can that there’s so many more. You have such a wealth of experience, but let’s move on here. This is about highlighting your journey to becoming a Master Trauma Therapist. People enter into this specialization of trauma for very different reasons. For me, as I’ve spoken about a lot, it had to do with my brother being in the special forces and returning from the war with PTSD, and myself not knowing what to say. I want to talk to him. I wanted to find out what was going on, but I was going about it in all the wrong ways and really screwing it up. Tell us a story. Break it down for us, Gerry. What led you into this field of trauma and helping these vets?

Well, that’s a good question, and it’s probably more subtle. I think, probably, when I heard about the Fort Bliss Restoration and Resilience Center being the total health center for trauma, I’d worked with trauma all my life with other people and other trauma situations: automobile accidents, death, and all these things, for years and years. However, no

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trauma should ever be equated with war trauma. Hardly anybody in life is required to be stressed, anxious, and depressed 24/7 for as long as the war has been going on. I think the military has missed the point here, Guy, that these soldiers and these vets, like your brother, they’ve been at war for 12 years. Not just when they’ve been deployed, when they come home, they never leave the war zone. Their brothers and sisters, many of them didn’t come back. The war is with them forever. We need to find some real comfort and loving and kindness and relaxation, allow nature to take her course with our soldiers. Nature will be our greatest healer if we just allow ourselves to be one with her, so to speak. If we can discover our true nature, we’ll come out of our trauma. If we don’t, we’re going to be stuck in those dark, cloudy, isolated places. It’s more, I think, appreciation and my own personal experience. A lot of people asked me, when they came to the R&R Center, they’d say, “Well, Gerry, you’re 75 years old.” I may have been 74 then, and I’m 79 now. They said, “How can you do this day in and day out?” And I said, “I do it, but I go home every night and I cry. I don’t understand it.” Then I finally learned I had compassion fatigue, whatever that is. We can only take so much before all of our systems get stressed to the max, too. I really want to caution. John Fortunato called special meetings for us, and he told us, “Don’t you guys work more than two years in intensive trauma units. It’s just too painful.” He did it at Chicago hospitals and other places, and he knew that. He guided us in there, but I just stayed a little bit too long because I love the soldiers so much. We just became brothers, and I still work with several that I started with about five years ago. They still live in the area, and they still want to participate. Now, they’re starting to, what with all they’ve learned about how to help themselves, they’re out helping others now, other veterans. These are going to be our best trauma therapists in the future, I think, Guy.

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So you said, Gerry, that you were interested in the trauma field even before you worked with veterans. What was it that drew you? You did mention that previously, but what was it that called you?

I think it was a calling, Guy, because I feel a real spiritual connection when I’m working with persons suffering the most in the world. I was always attracted. Something inside me, probably my spirit, was saying, “Go to the mental hospital and help those people. Go to the prisons.” I was the first teacher in a maximum security prison in Pittsburgh. I just had to go in these places and see how these human beings are being treated. They were mostly disrespected, disregarded, punished, harmed without any personal caring. There’s so few of us, Guy, and I know you’re like this, too. I can hear it in your voice. It’s more of a spiritual thing that’s hard to grasp. I try not to ever use that too much because it’s looking for a single solution, often, and I think there’s a multiplicity of interactions and relationships that get us into this. I think it’s that I’m being guided and directed to our Creator. I’m a believer that we’re all created and guided in this life, too.

So, I think that there’s a really good message here for our listeners, which is for those listeners who are maybe starting out on this journey or interested in trauma therapy, there’s a sense, a calling to honor that, to go with that and go seek that and pursue that. That’s great, Gerry. I really appreciate that. We talked a little bit about your journey, what led you to the specialization of trauma, and you, I think, pointed out that it’s not a very easy question to answer. Let’s focus now on an early clinical error you made and what you learned from that. Tell us a story about an early clinical mistake you made that had a significant impact on the work you did, what you learned from it, and how it’s influenced you as a clinician.

I’d like to talk a little about—I don’t think he’d even mind me mentioning his name; it’s almost 35, 40­something years ago—this guy from New York City came into my mental health center and was looking for some

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way to withdraw from heroin. This is good because all of our soldiers have to withdraw from all those chemicals and stuff if they want to get better. I just learned so much from him because he said he wants to do this, and people can have the desire to change, but I had to bail him out of prison three different times in the three years I was working with him. The third time I

said—and it could be a mistake, but maybe it wasn’t—“I’m sorry Louie, I’ve just had it with you. You say you want to get better, and you don’t. You go steal some more stuff for your heroin. All the bells are going off in all the stores in Pittsburgh, so this is the last time I’m bailing you out. You either clean yourself up totally, or you go find somebody else to work with you. I love you kindly, but this is it.” I think that was my last straw with him and his last straw with me, and he gave up his cigarettes, went to massage school, and became a great massage therapist. I learned so much from him, too, but we do make mistakes along the way, which led me to believe—not even believe, I don’t even want to believe anything anymore; I just want to experience it—if we have a self­care plan—I require that of all of our soldiers, and I don’t know of anyone else who does this, but I’m encouraging other trauma therapists to do it for that reason I just gave—if they develop a daily self­schedule to work on their physical, mental emotional, spiritual and social relations and work that into a self­care plan, have a support group, have an advocate at their side, like I was with Louie, and work this way through your pain and suffering. You will, if you commit and have a plan. I ask them to stand up and raise their right hand. “I’m committing myself to be the best I can be. I will become the best I can be.” I just ask them to say that—and, you know, Guy, I also have a big mirror in my room, and I ask them to stand in front of that room, and you show me when you were at your highest spirit as a warrior. Show me that warrior, show me that warrior. They do, and when they do, they’re shocked because it’s inside them, and that’s them. They never lose who they really are.

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Wow. Gerry, I’m thinking about how I’m going to get to New Mexico. I want to come see you. That’s what’s going through my mind right now. I mean, there’s just something, I think profound is kind of overused, but it’s not simply a warm heart. It’s not simply wanting to care, but in addition to that, I think what’s coming through is this searing experience that you have that’s been honed and that really speaks to what it means to be a master in your field. That’s coming out. It really is.

That’s a good observation there. It’s hard to explain. I think you’re right, though. It just comes out as our experience after a while. I’m never going to retire. I don’t think you will, either.

Yeah, I don’t know. Regarding Louie, was it that you “gave up on him,” was that your error?

I thought it was at the time because I always swore I would never give up on anybody, but in his case I felt like my insight was right, and apparently it worked because every other time he just kind of ignored it, and when he saw that there was nobody going to be there for him anymore—and it’s so hard to withdraw from cigarettes and cocaine and heroin. Those are third level compensatory behaviors. I teach all the soldiers about compensations, too. There’s only four relatively safe outlets, and I think every therapist ought to know that. I learned that from Oscar Ichazo. We have four relatively safe outlets in a society that is so out of balance and out of tune. It’s amazing that everybody isn’t a goner because there’s hardly any loving, kindness, sharing, touching. Everyone’s kind of withdrawing into their own selves and their own groups. Anyway, there’s food, sex, drugs, and work. The military guys can’t take marijuana. That’s one of the best outlets to compensate for stress: body, mind, emotions. It calms it. Many have been kicked out of the army for taking marijuana to help them with their serious injuries. They’ve got to get it together here. They better start giving medical marijuana to every soldier that wants it coming back from the wars. It’s probably one of the best solutions to some of the serious

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suicides and serious injuries we’re seeing. With the conflicts in the home, it’s amazing how any family can ever make it after these wars, Guy. They’re just so stressed, always depressed. They don’t know each other. They don’t know themselves. They’re so hurt.

Yeah, it’s just true. It’s just something that we’re being reminded of every day in the news. I think one of the reasons why I’m really excited to speak with you because it seems like what you’re doing is at once novel, but at the same time it just makes so much sense. It seems common sense. This integrative holistic treatment for warriors you’re talking about, correct me if I’m wrong, but this is not the norm, right?

No, unfortunately it’s not. There are very few behavioral health clinics inside and outside the military that even refer to us, and we have greater success in the integrative areas than they’ll ever have in conventional medicine. I’ve seen it over the past five years with these soldiers I’ve been working with. I work with a soldier 15 hours a week. We do it in groups, we do it individually, we just spend lots of time together because their whole being, we’re all healing and recovering from these serious injuries. They’re injuries to the cellular formation. I’ve learned a lot, too, about the body, that every system in an organism has a mind of its own, and this is what psychiatry and psychology and mental health doesn’t get. For example, I don’t know of any soldiers that come back who haven’t had intestinal concerns. They should undergo intestinal cleansing when they come back from these putrid, toxic places like West Virginia—I’m sorry, my wife’s in West Virginia—but I mean from the coal mines and all these deployments. They’re injured to the core, and our digestive system has a mind of its own. It has to be cleansed. Our cardiovascular system needs to be totally relieved of all the stresses it’s encountered. The nervous system is just so on red alert 24/7 when they come home. They need every possible calming approach, but not the drug chemicals that cloud over their mind and make them unable to really interact and relate with others and themselves. Those chemicals, those cocktails, every

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soldier I’ve worked with, when they’d withdraw from them, they all got better. Those who didn’t withdraw from them and stayed out of our groups and work, they’re still suffering enormously. I just know that if they give up their chemicals, work intensively and extensively like we said, Guy, they’re going to get better. I’ve seen it. I had a medic who was on the Hidden Enemy talk by CCHR. CCHR put out a documentary, and they came from Switzerland to interview him and me about these trauma issues. He had such great experience. For five years, he was suffering, taking 12 to 14 of these psychiatric meds, and he didn’t know what was even happening. He didn’t know who he was. He was put in a mental hospital, attempted suicide. He was rescued there, put back in a hospital. Finally, I got him, and he recovered. I got his family with him. He was homeless. He was five years a marine, 10 years as a medic, just one of our remarkable warriors. Our VA and other resources weren’t serving him whatsoever. They didn’t know what to do. They just know how to drug and label. They don’t know how to use touch and meditation and all these other health resources. One of my soldiers, similarly, was a combat vet, enormously stressed. He swam 23 laps a day during our exercise program and cleansed himself by swimming. Some of them will find a special way. Some use horses and dogs, so many outlets. We should use every possible. That’s what I’m thinking. Our communities should welcome home these vets with every possible health service so they can recover from 12 years of suffering. They’ve been suffering for 12 years, going inside, trying to find out how could they be so hurt, because they’ve had to be, 24/7, on guard, prepared to die.

Gerry, what advice do you have for people who want to get into this field? I mean, obviously you have so much experience and so much heart and so much feeling about this, but to our listeners, for those people who are just thinking about maybe getting into this field, or maybe scared about getting into trauma, they don’t know much. What would you say to someone? How would you advise them?

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Well, first off, they’ve got to walk the talk, or talk the walk. They’ve got to have a self­care plan just like the soldiers that they work with. They’ve got to work out, work on themselves, all those systems. If they don’t, they won’t be trusted. I’ve worked with a lot of therapists who called themselves trauma therapists, but many of them, they didn’t listen. They would sit at their desks, typing on their laptop everything the soldier tells them, so they’re doing their business with the soldier rather than getting to know their clients and their patients and being honest and open and accepting and allowing them to be who they are without judgment. Analysis, interpretation, and all those crazy things they learn in some of their academic programs, I think they’ve got to give up those ideas of analyzing, interpreting, and judging because only the injured warriors know what they’ve been through. We’ll never know. We only know our own experience, and that’s what I would tell a trauma therapist. Learn from your veterans. Learn from them. Listen to them. Don’t judge them. Don’t analyze them. Just be present with them. Be kind, listen. They know if you’re there just to do your business, and that’s why they’re not attracted to it. What does a one­hour session a week do for anybody anyway? I don’t know, that’s just off the top of my head, Guy, but I think they’ve got to learn to engage their trauma person, their injured warriors and others as their family. This is your brother. This is your sister. Listen to them. Care about them. They know. Hug them. I was always the first one to our center because I wanted to welcome them into the center every day when they came in. I wanted them to feel this is their home now, and I’m going to be in their home, and I’m going to be with them 24/7. They’d call at three in the morning, they’re up on the mountains and forget where they are or something. It’s the most complex, probably, therapeutic job in the world. You just gotta know, if you want to change somebody, you stay out, but if you want to help someone, be a guide, listen, be a resource. Learn about your community resources. Pull in others’ resources to help your clients make sure they get everything. A conventional

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counseling session is like a venting experience. They could do that over a poker game or a beer. I don’t think we ought to even think about sending these injured warriors to conventional practitioners. They’re just a waste of beautiful humanity, I’m sorry.

So, if you want to change somebody, stay out. If you want to help them, the door’s open.

The door’s open. They’ll know it, too, because they’re so sensitive. They’ve been so injured. Every sense picks up every sound, every sense. They can smell what you’ve been eating for lunch, for a reason. Everything has been stretched to the max. That’s war trauma, and it’s different than any other kind of trauma. I really don’t like it when I see them put other kind of trauma issues with war trauma because there just isn’t anything like it from all my 52 years of social work professional practice.

So you’re saying as far as providing treatment or healing or help, war trauma is in its own category.

I think it has to be in its own category. It requires an enormous amount of experience. I think that’s why Dr. Fortunato hired all of us who had at least 15 to 20 years of experience. He didn’t hire fresh people out of anywhere, and I think he was right about that.

Let’s move on. You’ve obviously got years of experience in this field. You’ve honed your ability to do this work. With the idea that each of us has different strengths, what do you think it is about you, about what you do that enables you to do the work effectively? What do you bring to the table, in a sense?

I think a fearlessness. I’m not afraid of anybody or anything. I practice martial arts, and I feel comfortable inside myself. I practice meditation three to four hours a day, and I’ve been doing this for 35 years now. I’m

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very comfortable with the practices and what’s required of us to learn these skills so that we can pass them on with comfort and skill. I think every trauma therapist ought to learn body, mind, spirit work. They ought to learn the whole body, what’s going on. Just getting mental health training isn’t enough. They should get trained in every system.

That’s clearly what’s coming out in how you talk about the therapy that you deliver. It’s obviously coming from this place of holisticness. It’s obviously more than just psychological. It’s mind, body, and spirit. It’s so excited to hear, Gerry. I just think that our listeners are, if they’re listening to this, if they’re driving, they’re just getting amped up. They’re getting psyched because it makes so much sense, and it cuts to the core of being in touch with each other, caring about humanity, wanting to touch them. I mean, the whole topic of touch is so controversial. As an aside, touch on that for a little bit, how do you navigate that?

I put some guidelines together, and I hope people will visit my website because I have a whole program called Guidelines for the Safe, Skillful Use of Touch.

I’ll have a link for that on the show’s page, too.

We need to have that safety out there. Otherwise we won’t be trusted. I let people clearly know very early on about these guidelines. I posted them in my office. Everybody knows me, so they know I’m going to hug and touch everybody. I don’t care. I just know that’s how we can relate and get the safety, security issues out there. Also, one of the biggest fears we have is to touch. Two of my great teachers said when we’re afraid or when we experience fear, we’re closest to the truth. If we’re afraid to touch, that means we’re outside of the laws of nature because everything in nature is touching us all the time, whether we’re aware of it or not. Does that make any sense?

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Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

That’s kind of where I am with touch, and I just love it. I would never have a session without at least doing a laying on of hands. I love giving foot and hand massages to soldiers because they’re hurt so bad. I love giving facials. I don’t give any naked body touch or anything, and we have deep tissue massage. My feeling, it’s not so much as a feeling, so much as an experience, I recovered from compassion fatigue because I got a deep tissue session every Saturday morning for the last two years I was working at a trauma center. It helped me recover enormously, because I think we store our pain in our back, and we can’t get to it, so we need help. That’s what mommy and daddy did for us. If they didn’t, those kids are suffering. So many vets didn’t get the mother and the kindness of loving touch and healthy touch, physical, mental, spiritual, emotional touch in their lives, and then coming back from war, a lot of this is new to them. We become their brothers. I think a lot of them identified with me as kind of their elder. Many were raised by grandparents, too, and there was a trust factor there. I come in with some of that trust that helps me with the soldiers, too, Guy.

We’ll have the link to that, again, on the show notes page, which is thetraumatherapistproject.com . You can hit on podcast and Gerry’s podcast. His show notes page will come right up. So, Gerry, what’s got you going right now in the present? What are you excited about now?

I’m starting to get organized so we can tell what’s happening. I went to meet with all the school social workers in Southern New Mexico and introduced them to this whole trauma business as warriors are coming back. I told every social worker I think if the VA took on this kind of idea that everyone who walks in the VA is your responsibility. Everyone who comes in for help in your system is your responsibility. Everybody who belongs in that system, they can’t allow anybody in that system to not serve those people with the highest regard, respect, dignity, kindness, knowledge, wisdom, and truth. They can’t be faking. They’ve got to be

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real and genuine and kind and learn how to engage their own family, even. If they aren’t doing well with even their own family, they shouldn’t be engaging others. They should take a look at themselves, kind of clean their act up. That’s kind of where I am. I’m kind of excited about it. I want to stop kids from being put in detention centers. I want to stop them from what they do in our community. If they identify with a psychiatric disorder, they send them to the mental hospital, they’re put in a row, and some service person comes and makes them take their drug cocktails until they drool. Then they go back to their rooms. That’s how they’re introduced to health in a mental hospital, no different from the ones I saw in 1970, hasn’t changed at all. Psychiatry is humanity’s killer. They’re destroying lives every day that come in. It’s so sad to see these families have been suffering. I have this image, when I’m working with a soldier that comes back from wars, that the mother and their two little children are sitting in the back of the Humvee while their partner’s in the driver’s seat or up on the gunner, and they’re sitting there holding their babies tightly and hoping that nothing bad happens to daddy today. It’s not imaginary when the whole family’s at war. They don’t get it. The whole family’s been at war. The whole family. Then they come home, and the family is so mad, they don’t know what happened. They don’t know how to come out of the grief and suffering. They’re not getting any kind of loving, caring attention. They’re only getting drugs and labels. That makes me sick.

You know, it’s just, I think, so moving to hear you talk about this, and I think so many of us who are listening will definitely want to do something and definitely kind of reach out and get in touch with you, Gerry. I think you can expect some emails. Can you recommend two go­to trauma books for our listeners, which have had a major impact on the work you do?

I would like to recommend the books that I have on my website. Most of those, I borrow from. I have a whole series, a bibliography on my website.

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We’ll definitely have a link for that, too.

Probably one of the most important books a solder will ever get if he’s able and not really hurt too physically is called “Psychocalisthenics.” It’s 23 yoga­type positions, all coordinated with the breath that produces strength, coordination, balance, and flexibility. It restores all those. I have adapted that series of exercise for the soldiers, along with some Qigong in our touch programs, and especially different forms of meditation. Calming the body, mind, spirit is so essential, and then keeping a dream journal, following their self­care plans. I especially appreciate Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche. He had a book called “Gesture of Balance.” He’s written 23 books, but he’s trained American therapists in Tibetan medicine. I feel like that’s my primary guide. Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche, any one of his books is going to serve. His meditation books, I used them in teaching my holistic classes at New Mexico State for years, and the students loved them. They all left school feeling better about themselves. No one should ever come to us, Guy, whether it’s individual, group, couple, or family, and not feel that they’re a better person when they leave us because they’ve learned something from us that’s honest, open, accepting, and allowing. We’re not showing off. We’re not trying to push anything on them or force them to do anything, but they recognize that we have some tools. They call them tools. I’m glad, because if they have these tools, they’re going to get better. Talk won’t be enough.

The book you mentioned, “Gesture of Balance,” we’ll have a link to that on the show notes page as well. Gerry, thank you so much. I mean, this has been incredible.

It’s incredible for me, too, Guy. You’re such a good, kind interviewer. I just feel like I could talk to you for a year. You’re definitely a trauma therapist.

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Well, I appreciate that. So, give our listeners the best way to get in touch with you, which, again, we’ll have on the show notes page, and then we’ll say goodbye.

I think my Comcast, GeraldVest@comcast.net is my email address, and my website is jerryvestinjuredwarrior.com . I apologize to anybody going in there because it’s so huge and enormous. I’ve had it up for so many years, but it’s like my storybook, as I say on the first page. I’ve been keeping a record of all these good things, and hopefully I’m passing them on through my website. I don’t mind giving my phone number out, either. 575­524­2379. I get calls quite regularly and I know so many people around the world and around the country, too. I can help guide them to integrative health services. That’s really what I would like to do.

That sounds awesome. Alright Gerry, you’ve been kind with your time, with your energy, with your experience. Thank you so much, and we’ll talk soon.

Oh, thank you, Guy. I really appreciate the opportunity, and you’ve been such a great interviewer. I really felt comfortable with you. You know how to engage soldiers, I know. I’d love to meet your brother sometime, too.

Well, that might happen.alright, sir, thank you so much.

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2. Don McCasland.

Guy:alright, a little bit about you, Don. Just shoot something personal about yourself, and then we’ll dive right in.

Don: Ok, well, personal stuff. You’ve hit all the professional stuff, but personal things that are just interesting to a lot of people, my wife of 18 years, Joanne, is also an MSW, and her focus is women’s issues and special needs in oppressed populations. My daughter, Angela, is graduating with her BSW in December, and her focus is aging population. My 15­year­old­son—yeah, there’s no relief.

Guy: You’ve got the whole, everybody covered.

Don: Yeah, and now sometimes we have to tell each other, “Hey, don’t try to social work me.” You know, because there’s just so much of it. My 15­year­old son, Ian, he has a huge amount of empathy, but he’s more focused on animals. He talks about being a historian or an archaeologist, so I think we’re going to have a break in the tradition with social work, but that’s cool as long as he’s happy and feels good about it.

Guy: Sounds good, sounds good. Thanks for sharing that. Alright, so let’s start here. We start out, on the Trauma Therapist Podcast, really the whole purpose is to get to know you, what’s inspired you. We start by asking you to share with us a quote, a mantra, something that’s inspired you or driven you in your journey and process. What do you have for us, Don?

Don: Well, I read a lot of stuff in my journey, trying to figure things out for myself as well as clients. Just so many quotes jump out at me, like [audio disruption] Dr. Ed Tick, Rumi, Jon KabatZinn, and I could go on and on all day about it. The quote from the Roman philosopher, Seneca, just really says so much to me. It has a perfect illustration of the key to

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helping people who struggle with trauma. The quote is, “For who listens to us in all the world,/whether he be friend or teacher,/brother or father or mother,/sister or neighbor,/son or ruler or servant?/Does he listen,/our advocate,/or our husbands or wives,/those who are dearest to us?/Do the stars listen,/when we turn despairingly from man,/or the great winds,/or the seas or the mountains?/To whom can any man say — Here I am!/Behold me in my nakedness,/my wounds, my secret grief,/my despair, my betrayal, my pain,/my tongue which cannot express my sorrow,/my terror, my abandonment./Listen to me for a day — an hour! — a moment!/lest I expire in my terrible wilderness,/my lonely silence!/O God, is there no one to listen?” Really, that last paragraph, “Behold me in my nakedness,” that just sums up the need for us, I think, as trauma specialists and community members to accept trauma survivors in their nakedness, which is at their most vulnerable and honest selves, stripped of any façade of strength or ability to endure anything and just be present there with the client in that moment, free from judgment. In my experience, part of the problem is that people are willing to talk about their trauma initially. They try to reach out and share with someone they trust. It could be a spouse or a parent or a good friend. Once they start to get to the heart of the matter and what they’re really struggling with, the details of it can get pretty overwhelming for the person listening, through no fault of their own because if they haven’t had experience with something as powerful or life­changing or any kind of training, that can be really hard to wrap their minds around. Again, through no fault of their own, they start to reach that saturation point, and it’s just too much for them, so then they feel like they have to extract themselves from that uncomfortable situation. Trauma survivors can feel like people don’t care, they’re not interested. Once we get stung, once bitten, twice shy goes the saying. Then you feel like, “Nobody gives a damn. I’m just going to start to retreat.” You close yourself off and avoid sharing. I’ve heard these sentiments from veterans who’ve been through the military or the VA system the use of meds to mask symptoms, the avoidance of talking

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things through or talking about the trauma at all. That’s often what they’re taught and the tools that they’re given. Avoid triggers, avoid talking or thinking about it, stay medicated. Trauma survivors do that, and our world just gets smaller and smaller, and things feel increasingly unsafe because you’re not resolving these issues. That’s where that “expire in my terrible wilderness,/my lonely silence!” comes into play. You feel so alone and just not able to come home spiritually or emotionally.

Guy: Wow, you just laid it all out there in the first part here, Don, and I think just so eloquently you’re bringing up these intense themes about, first of all, just free from judgment and talking about the individual just being there in their nakedness and how we as therapists have to kind of embody that presence. Like you said, from no fault of their own, whether it’s a non­therapist, in a sense, it’s not always easy, and we often don’t understand the ramification that’s going to have for the trauma sufferer. I love everything you’re talking about here and your image that, this often comes up, of the world, in effect, for that individual, becoming smaller and smaller. Of course, we know what happens as a result of that. Individuals don’t seek help. They often turn to substances and many other things to help them come. Awesome. It really begs the question of your own experience, which perhaps we might get to, but obviously I think what you’re sharing is really, really profoundly inspiring for myself and our listeners, too. Let’s kind of dive in here and talk about the specialization. This is about highlighting your journey. People get into this field, Don, obviously for a variety of reasons. I got into it. My brother was a veteran. There are other people who don’t have certain stories, but whatever it is, people are drawn to this field for a particular reason, a calling, perhaps. Share with us what got you into this field.

Don: Well, you mentioned my personal struggle with combat­related trauma and PTSD and also survivor’s guilt. I had a lot of issues with that. I carried that rock on my back for a long time, so I was compelled to

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reach back and help others through what just feels like the longest, darkest tunnel. You’re in the middle of this tunnel, and it seems like there’s no light, or there’s light but it’s just the tiniest little pin prick on the horizon that you’re never going to be able to get to. Being in that tunnel before I got help from a compassionate counselor, I felt I was just stuck there and not moving. Things had reached the point that while I was on mentor leave during my final deployment in 2008, I seriously contemplated suicide. I was home visiting family, and I’m riding around on the riding mower in the back yard, and that was one of my favorite ways of closing myself off because you can’t talk to people. You don’t have to interact with people on the riding mower, so that was one of my things. So, I’m driving around cutting the grass that was an eighth of an inch tall and didn’t need cutting, but that’s where I hide, you know? Suddenly, just out of nowhere, this thought pops in my head, “If I killed myself, all of this would just stop.” It was just that fast, that thought. It was just that easy. No emotion, no regret or shock or horror or anything that people might imagine it would be. It just came to me, just as plain and easy as thinking about, “Man, it’s hot out today. I’m going to get some iced tea when I’m done riding around on the mower.” It was just that simple. I hung onto that thought as an option for a really long time. I remember things like that, and that’s what brought me to this field.

Guy: So, what happened after that? Obviously you got help at some point. How did you decide to get help?

Don: Well, that’s another part of my story that just helped me so much and helps other people when I share it because I don’t have a problem sharing it with clients. Self­disclosure, sometimes it’s good, and in this case for my clients it’s really helpful. What got through to me finally was that my wife and I had an argument like so many other arguments before then, but for some reason this particular night, the light bulb came on. It’s nothing she had never shared with me before, but this time it stuck for whatever reason. You never know, but we had a blowout. We’re on the

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king size bed, and she’s on one end facing away, and I’m on the other end facing away. This really stuck. This night I thought, “Oh my God, I’m getting ready to lose everything in life that matters: my family, my home, anybody that gives a darn about me. I’m going to be the lonely, angry veteran sitting at the end of the bar, drinking a beer, that nobody wants to be around because he’s a miserable SOB. Stay away from that guy. I stayed awake for most of that night, either just lying there and thinking or crying and just thinking, “This is it, man. This is all going to be gone. I gotta do something.” That was that breaking point for me.

Guy: Wow, and then you decided you needed to get help.

Don: Yeah, and I got help for real. I didn’t just go through the motions because I had previously, but like so many other people in my situation, I went because my wife insisted that I go. I went and I was thinking, “If I go to this stupid counseling thing, she’ll get off my back.” I really just kind of half­stepped it for many, many sessions until it got real for me, finally.

Guy: Then the transition from getting help to providing therapy for other people, how did that transition come about?

Don: Well, after I started going to counseling, I did couples’ counseling for a few sessions and then I realized I gotta deal with my individual stuff or this couples’ counseling is not going to work because I’m going to keep bringing my personal crap to table, and it’s going to sabotage everything. So, I got a referral from our couples’ counselor, and then I started in individual counseling. That’s when things started to fall into place. Once I did, I realized so many of my brothers and sisters are struggling just like I am. Somebody’s gotta do something. I gotta do something. So, that was that decision point for me.

Guy: Well, Don, I just want to thank you so much just for sharing. It’s so personal and so intimate. I so appreciate it. I can feel it, and I’m sure the

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listeners can feel it. I hope that people who are out there and maybe who are contemplating suicide and who haven’t yet gotten help will be inspired by this because your voice and the way you speak is very moving. One of the things I want to ask you is, we as civilians, we hear so many times, we hear so much about it. It’s in the press about how a lot of veterans don’t want to get help or are not getting help for fear of stigma. What was your experience with that? How did you struggle with that, or did you?

Don: Once I got to that breaking point, I didn’t struggle at all because I realized this is it, but prior to that I kept all that stuff bottled up because I was a platoon sergeant, and I’m responsible for 45 or 50 people’s lives in combat. So, I can’t show that I have these problems, these issues, these struggles. I’ve got to keep it balled up and buried in my gut. So yeah, I didn’t want to be the weak one. That kind of wasn’t good for me because I was keeping those emotions in, but also I have that tough façade, that hard façade, so then more difficult things kept getting piled on me because people were looking at me and thinking, “Oh, he’s good to go. He can hack it, so we’ll just give him this other thing.” One of the things was I was made the sergeant in charge of the remains recovery for my unit during my last deployment. That’s about as horrible as it sounds, but that’s what was coming toward me because I had this veneer of toughness. So, just more stuff to have to deal with and add on to it.

Guy: What do you think, as therapists, even as society at large we can do to help? Well, let me just say as therapists. What can we do to help de­stigmatize post­traumatic stress, posttraumatic disorder, whatever it’s called. That might even be one thing we consider. What would help?

Don: Yeah, well just listening, I mean really listening like I mentioned and just listening to what they have to say no matter how horrible or difficult it is to hear that information and what they went through. People just have to stop and listen and just be there and appreciate what’s being

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shared with them. I think that’s part of the problem. Everyone knows about suicide rates and the numbers and the numbers on the VA waiting list for counseling. It’s all about numbers, so we get stuck on that, and we forget about people. These numbers are not just figures. Each individual number is a person that is struggling. We’ve got to keep that in mind, that it’s all about people, so that one­to­one connection makes a huge different. It really does. They’re not just a figure or a percentage, but they’re a person. That gets forgotten, I think.

Guy: Yeah, ok.alright. So, let’s move on here. I’m just so glad you’re here talking about this, Don. I really am. We talked a little bit about your journey, what got you into this field. Now let’s focus on an early clinical error, a mistake you made, an error you made, and really what you learned from that, how that has formed the therapy and the treatment you provide.

Don: Well, my biggest, earliest mistake was the thing I preach about the most now, which is selfcare. Starting out, when I started feeling better and wanting to get in there and help, I was so motivated, but it was just a little too much. Well, not a little. Hell, it was a lot too much. I had either blurred lines or no lines with regard to work and home. I would come home from the office and then continue working, answer emails, do research for the agency, look for resources for clients, just on and on. It was like I was in the office, but it was just in a different building, my house. I wasn’t taking care of myself at all. I lost sight of the fact that if I wasn’t at my best, I couldn’t give my clients or my family or the agency my best. When I was doing ScreamFree Parenting training, they talked about the oxygen mask metaphor in the airplane. I think you’ve discussed that on previous podcasts, that they tell you to put your mask on first before you put your mask on your child or somebody that needs assistance because if you’re not taking care of yourself, you can’t be there for somebody else when they need you the most. It’s not about being selfish. It’s about being smart and being there for somebody else. If

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there’s anything I could share, it would be self­care. Find something that helps you stay grounded and focused. For me, I have a morning ritual, saying aloud a quote from the Native American chief Tecumseh. I also read aloud the Way of the Warrior code of conduct, and it outlines things that I should focus on as someone on the warrior’s path, things like polite courtesy, honesty and justice, honor, compassion, that and mindfulness through the day. Because of the intensity and emotion that comes with what we’re doing, working with trauma survivors, staying grounded throughout the day and maintain a safe zone in your home, those are key components. We should serve as a witness to their pain, their soul wound, or their burden that they’re carrying, but then we can’t keep carrying that burden all day ourselves or else we’re no good to anybody.

Guy: Yeah, I mean I love what you’re talking about here because it is that kind of balancing act of being compassionate, being sensitive to hear, to listen, and to bear witness like you said, but also being able to maintain that flexibility to not be overcome with what we’re hearing but be able to act and to provide treatment. I just love what you’re talking about here. Self­care is huge, and again, as I have talked about on this podcast, I think it’s something that a lot of therapists give lip service to because it’s hard. You’re sharing this story, which I think is great, about coming home and answering emails, doing research and trying to provide resources for your clients. Your home served as annex two for your business. I just think that there is so much in self­care. I don’t think we can hear of it enough, the importance of it, so thanks for sharing that, Don.alright, so we get to one of my favorite questions, which is “Why?” We talked about challenges. You shared an early clinical error. You don’t make that error, of course, now, do you?

Don: No, I don’t. It’s a work in progress. I work on it hard every day.

Guy: I really believe it’s important that we know why we’re doing something. I find it so inspiring because I think the answer drives us

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in what we’re doing and our passion along our journey. So, share with us, Don, why you continue to do this day after day.

Don: Well, we’ve talked a lot about it so far, but it’s just because I struggled for years with this PTSD and survivor’s guilt. What I allowed it to do to me and the pain I put my family through was just ridiculous, looking back on it. To have them fear me and what was my mood or my reaction going to be from moment to moment. It was like flipping a light switch. To think about that and the fact that I was contemplating killing myself because all of this would just stop. I know what it’s like to sit on that couch across from a therapist and just feel so desperate for help and hoping that this is going to stick because this is the end, man. That’s my why. I do this because it feeds my soul and my heart. It’s the reason I went through all of the horrible things I experienced and why other people died and I lived to come home. This work, it’s what my destiny is, and it’s what I’m supposed to do, bottom line. That’s my why. I gotta do it.

Guy: Yeah, you are so inspiring, man. I mean, I love it. I really do. Because you struggled for years with survivor guilt. All of this is going to be up on the show notes page. I’m going to hook up your blog and the website. That’s going on. I wanted to kind of shift gears a little here, Don. As you were talking about you know what it’s like to be sitting on the couch across from a therapist. What do you do? Do you think, or perhaps do you even know what it is that you do when you’re in session with a veteran for the first time that kind of gives them that sense of ease? Maybe it’s just for the fact that you are a veteran who’s gone through that. Share with us what do you think that is.

Don: I’m just as genuine and open as I can be. I let them say what they’re gonna say, and I let them pour it out because that first session, either they’re kind of hesitant or they’re just ready to spill it all. Whichever way it goes, that’s how it goes, and I just let it go that way. I let them know. I don’t make it about me, but I’ll sneak a little something in there to say, “Oh yeah, I struggled with this for years.” I give them just a quick

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example of how, and I just let them know that they’re not alone. They’re not nuts. They’re not broken. There’s nothing wrong with them, and you can come out on the other side. They just look at me, and their eyes get like saucers. They say, “Holy crap, that’s exactly how I feel. You know what I’m talking about.” That just opens so many doors.

Guy: So, you’re not alone. You’re not broken. You’re not nuts. I love it.alright, Don, many of our listeners are early stage therapists in general who are just kind of getting into this field and want to learn about trauma therapy and really may be interested in working with veterans. A lot of people are. Some of the listeners are more experienced therapists who maybe are not really familiar with trauma­informed treatment. Usually I just kind of open it up and just ask for advice for people who want to learn about trauma therapy, but I want to ask you what advice you would give for individuals who really want to work with veterans.

Don: You’ve really got to have the heart for it because it’s some pretty intense stuff. I mean, trauma is intense, but then you have this added thing for veterans that they try to keep it to themselves. They’re kind of a closed off society. I would say in that motivation to help to not let compassion and empathy get in the way and cloud your judgment. By that, I mean any young social workers or any practitioners starting off, you’re going to hear the most gut­wrenching things from people. My clients said they’ve survived combat­related and sexual assault trauma, and some of them a combination of both if you can imagine that. That’s just, I can’t get it. The loss of young children, the murder, the loss of a spouse, to have them open up and share those details, our first instinct as practitioners, as just humans, is to help, to jump in there, do everything we can to soothe or fix the problem. But, in order for the brain to start processing this stuff and begin the work in healing itself, we have to be there and just listen. Give them the safe space to talk and share what’s on their minds. In order to do that, you have to get comfortable with awkward silence. You can’t fill that

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void with chatter. Give them time to get their thoughts in order, especially with vets, because PTSD, much like traumatic brain injury, you start talking about processing issues. Sometimes it’s hard to put words together to explain your emotions. This skill has been huge for me. I’ve waited clients out anywhere between 10 to 15 seconds to almost four minutes. If you just wait for them to process it and speak, what they’re going to share is going to be more useful and important than any so­called wisdom that we can impart on them. Once we start filling the silence with chatter because we feel weird or awkward, it becomes about us and not the client. That’s not helpful. The other advice I would say is just be the best you that you can be. Veterans, they want to see somebody that wants to help and that’s genuine and not just trying to push them through the system and “yeah, yeah” them to death and make the next appointment. This is, again, through personal experience sitting on both sides of the fence. You don’t want somebody who’s talking over your head or talking over what you’re feeling with a bunch of terminology or someone who’s not genuine because you’re not feeling it. You’re not feeling it from them, and it’s not going to go anywhere. There’s a meta­analysis on the effectiveness of treatment modalities for PTSD done by Benish, Imel, and Wampold. The therapeutic relationship accounted for 30 percent of the positive outcome expectancy, 30 percent. Then, client positive expectancy was 15 percent. Some other stuff that’s tied to those first two things like completing your treatment, that accounted for another 30 percent. So, 75 percent of positive outcome expectancy is the therapeutic relationship. That means 15 percent is directly related to your particular flavor of treatment modality, so that relationship is absolutely the most important thing for folks dealing with this stuff. I’m really a believer. You gotta be real. You gotta cut through all the BS and put it into terms people can understand and relate to.

Guy: Yeah, I mean I just love this because what you’re talking about really resonates with me so much, and it really brings back the attention to our own processes as therapists, our own awareness, our own level of

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awareness as therapists, and how authentic we can be, how genuine we can be in that session with that person sitting before us. Again, this comes back to, in a sense, self­care. I’ll just make a general statement here, but I think it’s very easy to want to reach for that next intervention and want to reach for that next new modality or whatever, but what I hear you saying and what I hear you communicating through your voice and your passion, really, is being real. That cannot be overstated. I think that’s such wise and sage advice, and yet it doesn’t seem to be easy.

Don: Yeah, it’s tough.

Guy: It doesn’t seem to be easy to do, because like you said, don’t let compassion and empathy get in the way. Be comfortable with silence, that awkward silence, oftentimes. Awesome stuff here.alright, Don. Let’s shift to some book recommendations which have inspired you. I know you kind of listed some authors in the beginning. These don’t have to be trauma­related, but share with us two books which have really inspired you in your path.

Don: There’s a ton, but the one that really opened my eyes at first, regarding combat­related trauma was “War and the Soul” by Dr. Ed Tick. I first stumbled on that book in about 2008 or 2009, so it was early on. I had not really even started school very much. I was doing volunteer work at Fort Campbell, Kentucky at Fisher House. They had a stack of them on their literature table during the Wounded Warrior lunch. I just saw the cover and picked it up, and I’m thankful. I was kind of serendipitous because right about that time I was going through counseling, and things were starting to fall into place, but I was still trying to explore the whys of my experience. That book helped me understand the historical foundations of combat­related trauma and that it wasn’t just about our experiences and the pathology of it but the fact that it was a soul wound. His new book, “Warrior’s Return” draws a map for us to follow with regard to healing soul wounds and our transformation to warrior elder and our ability to guide others along that path. I’ve been to their Level 1

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training. I’m getting ready to go to their Level 2 master’s training here in January, so that’s really been helpful for me. The second book would be “Trauma Made Simple” by Dr. Jamie Marich. It was published just this year, but a lot of the principles that were discussed in the book were ones I first learned about when I attended a CEU seminar she held in Nashville about two or three years ago. That was the first time I had really been part of a discussion that emphasized the importance of the whole person from assessment to treatment and therapeutic alliance and then to reintegration. In the book, she also discusses grief, bereavement, and mourning, which I think is a component that’s ignored or forgotten because it’s inevitable that those are going to come into play. Trauma survivors, they grieve and mourn a loss of their former self, their ability to deal with certain situations, maybe a military career cut short by an injury or something like that, so that’s important, too, with trauma, is grief, bereavement, and mourning. It’s there.

Guy: Yeah, awesome topics here. So, two books: “War and the Soul” by Ed Tick and “Trauma Made Simple” by Jamie Marich. So, awesome. Let’s talk about what you’ve got going on here. I know you’ve got a blog. I know you’ve got the website up. Soldiers and Families Embraced, how did that come about?

Don: Well, I was approached by the executive director when I was still an undergrad social work student. I was a veteran, and she had this idea. She approached me and said, “Hey, I think you can really help out with this and make this happen.” So of course that was what I wanted to do with my life at that point. This opportunity presented itself, so I dove right in. I’m now the program director there currently, and it’s just grown exponentially. It’s a small agency, and it’s local in the Clarksville, Tennessee area, which is right next to Fort Campbell. Right now we’ve almost served 780 clients. Right now we have about 250 active clients. We have 16 counselors that provide services.

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Guy: What kind of services, specifically, do you provide?

Don: It’s free because it’s a grant­ and private donation­driven. Free counseling services, individual, couples, families, counseling for military­connected kids, active duty veterans, and their family members. We also do other wrap­around social services, client advocacy, connecting people to resources. We also do healing retreats. We just recently held a Singing Their Stories songwriting retreat where we pair our participants with songwriters from Nashville, which is about 45 minutes down the road. There’s that therapeutic music that helps them tell their story in the form of a song. That makes it easier to share. We do Your Heart on Art. We partner with them and offer therapeutic art. We partnered with the War Garden Project, which is therapeutic horticulture. We sponsor Soldier’s Heart veteran healing retreats. We’ve also worked with the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, which is also in Nashville. They had an exhibit on Goya: The Disasters of War and Steve Mumford’s Baghdad Journals. He’s a combat artist who did water colors, and they were kind of paired together. They consulted with us how best to display this and to take things into consideration. Veterans and survivors of trauma, how can we suit their needs and how we can address things that might pop up for them that’s painful or difficult to deal with. We’re doing a lot of stuff out in the community.

Guy: So, Soldiers and Families Embraced, and the link for that will be on the show notes page. You’ve also got a blog going, Functional Veteran.

Don: Yes, Functional Veteran. I just blog about veterans’ issues, PTSD. I speak to families and their struggles as well. I keep it, like I said, as plain and as genuine as I can because soldiers read things that somebody who was a soldier writes, and it just cuts through all that stuff and gets to the heart of the matter and helps people just kind of understand what’s going on. I help explain some difficult and confusing things. Yeah, Functional Veteran is my blog.

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Guy: So, Don, what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you?

Don: Well, you can reach me via email at socialworkerdon@gmail.com or functionalvet@gmail.com . My cell number is 931­771­2611. I also have a Twitter account for my blog. It’s @functionalvet , and I’m also up on LinkedIn like so many of us are.

Guy: Ok, awesome. All those links will be up on the show notes.alright, Don, awesome. I’m just so glad that you took the time to do this. It was just a pleasure meeting you. Your inspiration and your passion infectious. No, I’m serious. It’s just great, and I want to thank you for your service. I should have said that up front, but I really mean that.

Don: Well, I appreciate it.

Guy:alright, sir. So, we will talk soon. Thank you.

Don: Yes, hopefully. Thanks.

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3. Larry Decker.

Guy:alright, Larry, so just a little bit about you for our listeners. Take a moment, share with us maybe a little personal information, maybe where you’re calling from, and then we will jump right in.

Larry: Ok. I live in Summerland, which is a small town just outside of Santa Barbara. I’ve been a surfer most of my life. Last couple of years I’ve had too many other things to do, and I’ve sort of given it up, but that really was more source of inspiration for many, many years, for over 30 years. I started when I was 15, so I guess it’s more than that. I’m 73 now. I’m married. I have two grown boys, a grandchild. I don’t know. What more do you want to know?

Guy: That sounds good. That sounds good. Awesome. So, where are you originally from?

Larry: Originally, I grew up in a small town in South Dakota. My parents moved to Anaheim, California in 1954, when I was 13. I consider myself a Californian, but originally I was from the Midwest.

Guy: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for sharing that. This podcast, Larry, is really about highlighting your journey as a Master Trauma Therapist with the goal of inspiring other clinicians. In order to do that, we first start out here with a quote, a mantra, something that’s kind of inspired you, that’s served as your guide on this journey, if you will, something that’s influenced you. Share with us whatever you got, whatever you’d like.

Larry: Yeah, well there are a lot of quotes that really drive my life and are a great focus for me. I suppose one that has been most important is if you have truth, if you know something that seems true—mostly relative truths, of course, but for you it seems true—you think it’s true for

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another person, and this is really the process of treatment, of course. If you’re able to put that into tactfulness, in other words you put it into a way that somebody else can hear it, then I think you have a real source of wisdom. The actual quote goes, “Truth clothed in tact becomes wisdom.” I think it’s just a loss in our culture, but it has to happen if we’re going to practice psychotherapy.

Guy: So, truth clothed in tact—is that intact, one word, intact?

Larry: No, that’s why I tried to explain it. It’s two words: in tact. It’s two words, and then it becomes wisdom.

Guy: Do you know who the author of that is?

Larry: Sure, Hazrat Inayat Khan. He was an early 20th century mystic who formed a whole Sufi order, which is very universal. A lot of Sufi orders are all universal because all mystics are universal. They tend to be a little bit more restrictive of who they allow in their order. His particular group was very influencing.

Guy: So awesome. So truth clothed in tact becomes wisdom. So, Larry, break that down a little. How has that—and I know you touched a little bit upon this, but kind of extrapolate more—how has that played out for you in your life or in the work that you do?

Larry: Well, I’ve been through a lot of Gestalt training, and of course in Gestalt you’re very confronting, generally speaking. Other forms of Gestalt aren’t as confronting. Generally speaking, they pretty much try to say it the way that you believe that it is. It’s sort of like hitting people over the head with things. It just never worked well for me, although I tried it quite a bit in the early days. When I saw this particular quote, I realized that it’s much, much, much more effective to try to understand where the other person is in their development and what it is that can communicate best for them.

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Guy: Awesome. So, I’m really interested to hear how this is going to kind of play out with your work with veterans, with combat veterans, specifically. Before we get there, this is, again, about highlighting your journey as a Master Trauma Therapist. People get into this field for a lot of different reasons. For me, as I’ve often spoken about on this podcast, my brother came back from Iraq. He was in the Special Forces with PTSD, and I was just so interested in finding out about his experiences and what he had done. I went about it in the wrong way entirely and just was a pester. This was, thankfully, before I knew about studying psychology, but in part this is why I’m doing this podcast, because I wanted to come back and do what I could do to help. So, share with us, Larry, break it down for us, tell us a story about how you came to get into this specialization of trauma.

Larry: I’m really moved by what you had to say about your brother. Special Forces guys are very special, and what they did over in Iraq and are continuing to do around the world is very, really incredible. As civilians, we really don’t know anything. It doesn’t matter how many books we read or how many movies we go to see or even how many veterans we speak to. If we haven’t gone and done that, we don’t know. That’s really one of the basic premises. The veteran has to teach us. That really helps a lot in terms of communication. How I got started, I was in private practice. I had been working for an institute, and I left the institute and a marine came in to see me who had been at Khe Sanh—Khe Sanh was in the Vietnam War—and had been surrounded by the NVA for several months. He told me about what had happened to him at Khe Sanh, and I got to know quite a bit about marines from this particular fellow. Like, for example, he said he was in a tank that attempted to break out of Khe Sanh, and they were met with such fierce resistance from the North Vietnamese Army that they had to go back to the base…That’s really the whole idea of the Marine Corps. There is no ex­marine. There are only former marines. Actually, there is one ex­marine. That’s Lee Harvey

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Oswald. Anyway, he asked me, he was doing RAP groups. That’s not like rap music. Back then RAP groups were formed by guys just dropping in any being able to talk about what had happened to other veterans. He wanted me to come and help him with that. My feeling was, well you know, I’ve got kids at home. Why would I want to go and do that? But, I said ok. So, I showed up that night, and I was very, very moved by what happened in the group that night. I stayed as a member of the group for almost two years, and then they asked me to form a private group where there wasn’t, because dropping groups really aren’t very effective. I mean, they’re great for the moment and give people the sense of camaraderie they’re looking for, but long term effects are very small. A private group that is just for these guys was great. Then I got a call from the VA, and they were starting a vet center here in Santa Barbara, and they wanted them to be part of it. I said ok and came on as a psychologist in the vet center system and stayed with that for 25 years, and then I retired about seven years ago.

Guy: So, what was it specifically about this group or about this individual or about the subject or topic of trauma in particular that drew you in, would you say?

Larry: Well, I’m a little bit older than those guys, but not much, and so it was sort of within my peer group. I’d been an anti­war protester, and I failed the physical when I was drafted, so I figured that they wouldn’t want me around, but it was just the opposite. I’ve asked a lot of guys since then, “Well, you know, you guys really don’t like draft dodgers and people who went to Canada. What about me?” All of them have said, “Well you showed up, and they said they didn’t want you, so we really appreciate the fact that you’re here.” It was this sense of them feeling this incredible sense of being an outcast in their country, that everything had changed in this country. Of course, actually, the country itself had gone through some significant cultural changes, but the big change had been in them. There’s a great mystic, Shahab Suhrawardi, back in the 11th century

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who wrote a treatise called “The Crimson Archangel” in which a soldier comes home to what is called the nakuja­abad, “Never Never Land.” Everything has changed because he has changed so much. That’s really what impressed me, and the depth of knowledge and understand of life they had, that they were unable to share with us because as civilians we really don’t understand what they’re trying to say. They consider themselves as bad people, like in a disorder, as having been broken, rather than seeing themselves as having something incredibly valuable that they could share with us, if only they knew how to do it.

Guy: So, what’s coming through here is this topic of spirituality, of meaning, of belonging, of existentialism, if you will. Obviously, you’ve written a lot about this. Now I’m wondering does this interest of yours, if we can call it that, is that a precursor to your work with veterans in this way, or did that come as a result of the work you did with these veterans?

Larry: Well, I’m not sure.

Guy: Well, the question is, I mean I hear you really talking a lot about your connection with these individuals was being kind of outcasts in their own country and kind of connecting with them on this almost spiritual ground, if you will. I know that a lot of what you’ve written about is meaning and spirituality and working with these combat veterans. Did your interest kind of parallel your work with these veterans? Did it come before working with veterans, your interest in Sufism, in a sense?

Larry: Oh, no. I’ve been involved with that since 1972. That really formed the basis of how I saw these guys, of course, and how I see everybody. It’s a sense of the fact that there’s more to it than what meets the eye. Of course, any good union will certainly go along with that. I mean, Jung talked about how our whole purpose is to make the unconscious conscious. I might even go a little further with that and say that it is

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possible—and of course I don’t know this for sure—but it is possible that there is a part of God, or if that bothers you, call it something else, that is unconscious, that doesn’t know that He’s God, and that’s us. The idea is for us to become conscious of that. When we become conscious of that, then God becomes conscious of that. What I saw in terms of wars and trauma was that the wars and the trauma our ordinary belief systems, which have to be broken down if we’re really going to understand what the purpose of our existence is. We’re not here for very long, and so what’s the reason for that? How come we’re here and everything seems so important on the physical plane? We always strive for money and comfort and whatever it is that we want. There’s an old saying that what you consider important signifies your level of evolution. We’re constantly searching for that. Now, these guys had an opportunity based upon the destruction of their belief systems to actually form new belief systems that would incorporate a greater view of the world and of existence because they had seen firsthand exactly how fragile the human person is. I mean, they even referred to us as just being bags of blood walking around. That really inspired me, and I saw that these guys are missing their whole opportunity, and so is the culture, so is society. If you talk to any civilian about veterans, they’ll do some kind of, “Yes, I support them” and all, but nobody really cares. The veterans will be the first to tell you that. We civilians, we give them lip service, but we don’t care. Ok, yeah, you went and did that. Great, that’s wonderful, let me buy you a beer or maybe dinner, but that’s about it. We don’t want to know about everything else. Nobody wants to hear about what happened to them. So, that’s why they come to see me, because I want to hear about it. To me, every single one of those guys has a very different story to tell, even guys who were in the same place at the same time, of course they saw everything completely differently than another person did. All of their travels, all of their journeys have been so important.

Guy: Yeah, Larry, I mean I just love what you’re saying because it just really hits to the heart of what’s going on, and it really just forms a

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powerful line to the quote you used. You know, truth clothed in tact becomes wisdom. You know, when I was doing my dissertation, which was on meaning making in combat veterans, there were very few articles that I could find that cut to the bone, that hit to the heart of that topic, except for yours. As you’re speaking, I’m remembering a lot of what I read in those articles. It’s so interesting because the dissertation I did was qualitative study where I called and spoke with veterans from all over the country, and they told me stories that just ring so true with what you’re saying. There was this—many of them, if not all of them—spoke about how their whole world, their whole belief system, their whole framework of spirituality, which they might not even called it that before their experience, but now that’s what it became for them after this experience, was completely rearranged, if not kind of decimated. That just kind of catapulted them into this world of confusion, and we know what happens after that for a lot of the veterans. When you’re speaking to me, and what I hear you saying and I’m sure what a lot of the listeners hear to, is this profound respect and hope and, I don’t know, I would call it love for the human being and caring for them. You know, just what you said, “I want to hear what they have to say.” This is a different story than I think what is generally being heard and talked about regarding veterans in popular culture.

Larry: I think anyone who works with veterans for a period of time has to come to grips with this whole perspective. We can’t just try to get these guys and women to change and become civilians again. That is simply not going to happen. Things have changed too much for them. They can’t go back to how we want them to be. They have to become even greater in terms of how they are. You know, in many ways they’re sort of like that old saying, “Giants aren’t aware of their strength.” They can really be very, very powerful people if we can get over this whole idea they have a disorder. The reason they have a disorder—Piaget, what did he do? He talked about two processes: accommodation and assimilation. If you do assimilation, that means your belief system is big enough that it will

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handle what just happened. Not too many peoples’ are. Most of our belief systems are fairly limited in terms of what we expect from the world, and that’s why they call it trauma, because trauma destroys belief systems, and we don’t know what to do with it. The second one, though, is accommodation. That’s where you either change the information, and that’s of course where the disorder comes from, because we try to change things and it just doesn’t work. We tell them they have panic attacks and depression and all the other things that constitute the disorder. But, if the belief system can change, if the belief system can be expanded so you can incorporate and integrate this new information that you have about what the world is really all about, then you become a greater person, or as they say, you become who you could be if only what you would be and might be.

Guy: I want to get into—what you’re saying really begs the question of how you work with these veterans. Obviously, that’s a very general question, but it just seems like such a rich experience for you, and you just seem to reside in this kind of glow of really getting in there and appreciating them, respecting them, and honoring not only what has happened to them, but again who they could be. I mean, it’s so inspiring to hear you talk about this.

Larry: Well, good. I’m glad because yes, that is how I feel. I see guys all week long, and it’s really incredible to be able to sit down and listen to these guys discuss what they’re saying. They always, every single one throughout all the last 30­something years I’ve been doing this, have always said, “You know, I can’t talk about this anyplace else.” They don’t even want to talk to other veterans about it, because generally speaking, most veterans didn’t go through combat. They were in the rear, or they were at stateside, and the combat veteran is a very small percentage of the total military force. There have always been derogatory terms for the guys in the rear, but the guys in the rear are essential. You have to have six soldiers supporting the one soldier in the field just in order to be able to

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make things work. It’s the soldier in the field that gets things like the Combat Infantryman’s Badge or the Combat Action Ribbon for the marines. Those are the guys that really understand. If you look even closer, people with the Purple Heart, people who were wounded, that’s an even greater significant portion of the population. They have an insight that is so valuable for our country and for our culture, it would be just awful. So here, I get a chance to witness it, to be someone who listens to that. It’s not just a story. It’s a reliving, and it’s an ability now so they can feel what they didn’t have the time to feel back then. When shit’s flying all around you and people are trying to kill you and people are being killed and there’s blood everywhere, you don’t have time to feel. Even after you get through and the adrenaline is kicking your butt and you’re lying there just feeling totally wiped out, you still don’t have time to feel because you’ve got to be ready in case something else happens. Now, here with me, they have a chance to feel. That is just such a wonderful experience for both of us. It’s fueled my whole professional career, and it still does. The VA came in the other day—actually a few years ago—and said, “How much longer are you going to do this?” I said, “Until I can’t.”

Guy: So, Larry, let me ask you a question here. The work you’re doing, is this the way that veterans are being treated in the VA, generally speaking?

Larry: Oh, that’s a really tough thing for me to comment on. When I worked in the VA, the majority of the people that I worked with and that I knew were really very well­meaning people who did the best job they could, and there were many of them that were really good at it. Then, there were people who didn’t do that. They’re the people who are generally thought of when the VA is talked about, and that’s not the best way to do it. I mean, the VA’s bad rap is deserved in some ways, and other ways it’s not because it ignores the incredible number of people. The VA is a huge bureaucracy. I mean, God, what was their budget last year? It was $80 billion or something like that. It’s just astonishingly huge, second

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only, I think, to the Department of Defense, which is three times that. So, I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you. I’ve given talks at regional trainings before. I was a supervisor, and I was an editor of one of the quarterly newspapers that was put out by the VA. I put forth all of these ideas, and most of these—not all of them—but I think I got the gist across. I don’t know if it’d make any difference.

Guy: What would you say is the difference in the work that you do for these veterans? I mean, you talked about, in a sense, how you worked with them, but what is it that you do that allows you to create that space for them, such that they can say, “Oh my God, I can’t talk about this with anybody except right here.”? I know a lot goes into that, but give us a framework or just an overview. Is it a question you ask, just your manner? What is it?

Larry: It’s all those things. I think it really comes out of the two years I spent in a group with them just as a group member without trying to do any treatment or anything, just being there and listening and interacting. From that, I gained a better understanding of what they’re about. I know most of the terms. They don’t have to explain a lot to me. Sometimes that’s important, even though I know the terms, sometimes I’ll ask them to explain it because they like doing that. They like talking about it. I understand a lot of how they are in terms of their sense of weapons and how important their weapon was. You know, of course it was. It kept them alive. There are really two groups of guys, of veterans who come out. One group will collect weapons, and they may even have 20 or 30 guns in their house. I’ll say, “Well, who are you expecting?” They’ll say, “Well, if they get between me and this one, I’ve got the other one over here.” Then there’s another group, which is about the same size, actually, who never look at weapons ever again. They don’t ever want to see a weapon. They don’t want anything to do with weapons. It’s a very interesting dichotomy. As to how those guys fall into those two groups, I’ve never really understood because they don’t seem that different.

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Guy: Yeah, my brother was in the latter group, definitely in the latter group there. He can’t, you know, talk about it, touch it. It’s off limits. Let’s kind of move on here. I mean, this is fascinating. Actually, this episode, Larry, is going to be published on Veterans’ Day, so I’m just so happy to be talking to you today and we can do that. So let’s move on. We’ve talked a little bit about your journey, what got you into this field. Now let’s focus on an early clinical error and what you learned from that. Share with us, if you will, an early clinical mistake, an error you made that maybe influenced you, and really what you learned from that.

Larry: Well, there are so many, but I suppose one that stands out for me. When I got out of graduate school, I did a post­doctoral internship with the VA in Long Beach in association with USC, University of Southern California. I was assigned to the spinal cord injury wards, and I got to know a young man at a ward who no one else had been able to really talk to. I was able to actually strike up a relationship with him, very informally. I’d just drop by once in a while, and he’d be on his gurney. He had horrible, horrible bed sores, I remember. I don’t know if you’ve ever really seen the kind of bed sores that spinal cord injury people, but they’re pretty amazing. But, I was able to talk to him. Then his sister and brother­in­law came in and wanted to talk to me because they heard I was working with this guy. I said, “Ok.” Well, that was a huge mistake because I didn’t get his permission, and he refused to ever talk to me again after that. That really tore me up, and I realized that’s not what we do. Even if veterans give me permission to talk to their significant others, I won’t do it. It just has never worked well. I remember I had been seeing this one fellow for quite a while, and he told me he had gone to the hospital for some surgery. I said,

“Ok,” and so we were going to skip a few sessions. His wife called me, and I took the phone call.

She said, “Well, So­and­so had to go to the hospital.” I said, “Yes, I know. He told me.” “HE TOLD YOU?! He never told me until he went

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in!” That’s just not a good idea. Regardless of how innocuous it may seem, it just doesn’t work well to talk with any significant others, I think, unless everybody’s in it for family treatment, which I don’t ever do anyway.

Guy: Wow, so what a story. You’re doing your post­doc, getting the VA in Long Beach. You finally are able to kind of crack the ice with this guy who’s got this horrific spinal cord injury. You’re developing a rapport with him. You’re able to talk with him. By speaking with his family and friends, that just did it. The walls went up. It’s amazing that—not amazing, but just incredible—that, which happened so long ago, really informs the work you do now. Wow, and to this day. That is so interesting. So, you’re like, “I’m not talking to any wives or any significant others. No way.” Wow.alright.

Larry: Although I had wives who called me, and if I don’t know who’s calling, I’ll take the call. I don’t say anything to them, except at the end I’ll say, “You know, I have to tell So­and­so that you called me.” They never call again, and they plead with me. “Please don’t tell him.” Well, I can’t do that. I have to.

Guy: Is this unique to the veterans you work with, or would this be civilians as well?

Larry: Well, the general population, it’s been a long time since I’ve worked with them. My guess is it would be similar. I think maybe veterans might feel slightly more intense about it, but that’s just because they feel more intense about everything. I think that’s probably true for everybody. You have to remember, one of the things that really pulled me in about this population was they weren’t the worried well, which is what we deal with mostly in the general population. They don’t have schizophrenia. They don’t have a psychosis. Sometimes there’s personality disorders mixed in with the PTSD, and that makes it very difficult. It’s really a challenge to try to help them work through all of

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that. The treatment is very effective. I think if we do it properly, the treatment is really good. Now, I use a form of cognitive exposure, and a lot of people feel, “Well doesn’t that just re­traumatize the person?” No, not if it’s done correctly. If you don’t do it right, yes that’s true. Yes, it will re­traumatize. If you do it properly, it works really well.

Guy: Let’s talk about that. Before we do, I want to jump into one of my favorite questions, which is “Why?” We talked about the challenges of this specialization, how you got here in a sense, Larry, but for me I really feel it’s important to know why we’re doing something because I think the answer to that just drives us along in what we’re doing, in our passion, and how we’re doing something. So, share with us why you keep doing this on a day­to­day basis.

Larry: There’s an old saying, “Why is a dog with a thousand tails? You feed it and another tail will come up.” I know what you’re driving at here. It just seems I’m connected. I feel that this is something that is important for me to do in my life. I think things have led me to this place. There are a lot of other roads I could have gone down, a lot of other ways I could have been, but this is what I chose, and it’s a very deeply fulfilling and meaningful experience for me. It’s been very inspiring.

Guy: So there you go. So, this really strong sense of connection. This is what you chose. It’s fulfilling and inspiring, and I think, I’m sure that everybody can hear it in your voice and the way you talk and really the respect with which you speak of the veterans that you work with. That’s just awesome. So, many of our listeners, Larry, are individuals who have experience, who are therapists with experience, but perhaps don’t believe that they’ve worked with individuals who’ve been traumatized and want to learn more about trauma­informed treatment. Other listeners are individuals who are just beginning to get on that journey of learning about trauma­informed care. What advice would you have for individuals beginning to get into this specialization of trauma?

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Larry: Well, I think the literature is really important. The Journal of Traumatic Stress has enormous numbers of very, very helpful articles. Joining an organization like the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies is extremely helpful. You get all kinds of colleagues with all kinds of perspectives. There are books that are available through those organizations that are very, very helpful, but basic, really basic. Anybody who’s starting out in this field is to get supervision from someone who knows what they’re doing. There was a volunteer organization—I forget what it was—and some woman psychiatrist thought, “Well, we have to help the poor veterans. The VA is not doing its job, so we have to start something.” I would talk with some of the people that were involved with it, and it was very sad for me to hear all of this because nobody knew anything. Nobody really knew what they were doing. No one had read the literature. No one had gotten supervision from someone who was really experienced and knew what they were doing. That’s just so basic to it. So, anyone who’s starting out, put it out there. Find somebody, and go in and talk to them and put out exactly how you’re doing things because you want to do it right. There are people that you’re going to be working with that have enormous potential for helping out our culture and our world, and you want to be able to help them do that.

Guy: So there you go. Read the literature, join these organizations which, obviously, a lot of the therapists I’m interviewing talk about. Lastly, get supervision from someone who knows what they are doing. Awesome advice there. Larry, let’s dive into your book. I’m so excited to hear you talk about this. Share with us what was the genesis of this book and talk about it. I want to hear you talk about this book.

Larry: Ok. You know, I have had a few other articles published, but I never thought I’d really put it together. When I retired from the vet center system, I had about four months off before they called me and wanted me to do this contract. In those four months, I knew I had to do something, and that was what I wanted to do, was to do the book. There’s a famous

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author who said, “Nobody likes writing, but everybody likes having written.” I don’t know if that’s true for everybody or not, but it was certainly true for me. I remember I told this friend of mine who is an English professor, I said, “Writing is too much like work.” She said, “No, you’re wrong. Writing is work.” That’s very true. It forced me to put it into a very coherent way of communicating. I had a lot of help with that. I had some editors who really took it apart. Karl Marlantes is an old friend of mine who wrote that wonderful book “Matterhorn” and then a second book, really awesome, called “What It Is Like to Go to War.” I sent one of the original manuscripts to him, and he really pointed out to me real

clearly the directions that I needed to explore more fully and the ones that were just sort of irrelevant and that were very important. Very, very helpful for me. Then, when Omega agreed to publish it, what a buzz, huh? Anyone who’s ever had a book published by anyone, it’s a really wonderful experience. The book itself is a real serious discussion about how to do this work. Also, I bring in the whole aspect of Sufism, the whole sense of what that is about and how that interrelates with the process of treatment and other aspects that can be done in order to deepen the treatment process from the perspective of a therapist. It’s not necessary, of course, that the veteran feel anything spiritual about anything, although they do. It’s not necessary for them to accept anything about any form of spirituality. That’s not what’s important here. What’s important is that we, as therapists, have a better idea of our expanded belief systems, our imago mundi. Our worldview can’t be flat. If our world is flat, then our patients are going to be flat. We don’t want that to happen because there’s too much else going on, so we have to have expanded worldviews. We have to increase our own belief systems. Let’s say we find a belief system that works really well. Great, fine, you have incorporated transcendence. Well, there’s a saying that we’re in ladders, and if we go up a rung of the ladder, we feel really good about it, very comfortable. Well, we just missed it because there’s another rung on the

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ladder. The man I studied with for a long time, for about 30 years, he used to tell me that he used to climb mountains when he was a younger man, in the Alps. He said that you need a guide when you climb a mountain because the foothold that you have on the side of your sheer cliff, it feels really comfortable. You don’t want to go on and move, but of course you have to move. So, your guide tells you to lift that right foot and move it up a foot above and you’ll find another foothold there. So, that’s the process. That is how it has to happen. I don’t know if that makes sense.

Guy: It does, it does. As you’re talking, I’m kind of going back to one of my former questions, which was, “What is it in the work that you do that creates this environment for the veterans to feel comfortable and to share their story?” In your answer, I’m hearing what I think is part of that, which is this expanded belief system, which the veteran doesn’t have to know about so much, but that expansion, if you will, I believe really sets the stage for creating that environment for the veteran.

Larry: I really thought I hadn’t answered the question fully. Believe whatever you want. There was this great article about the Dalai Lama in High Times Magazine back in the early ‘70s. They were asking him, they said, “Well, what about the relationship between LSD and states of consciousness?” He said, “LSD, drugs cloud the mind.” The guy kind of frowns and says, “Well, what about Timothy Leary’s work relating LSD experiences with the Tibetan Book of the Dead?” He looked at him and said, “Believe whatever you want.” I think that’s two of us as therapists. Awesome, we can believe whatever we want, but I think that what’s important is to have some sense of transcendence and immanence. Rumi, the great poet, he always said, “When I’m lost in your transcendence, you reveal your immanence, and when I’m lost in your immanence, you reveal your transcendence.” Poetry, art, music, all of those things tend to lift us out of the ordinary ways of looking at life. That’s so important to have that. Behind all of that is a spiritual, mystical practice that, to me, is basic to this work. Again, there are many people that are so evolved, that are so

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advanced that their lives are spiritual, mystical practices. They don’t have to sit down and do things like what I do. They just are that. Now, obviously those are pretty rare people, but nevertheless it’s true. Whatever works for you. It doesn’t have to be anything formal or anything like that. There’s no dogma at fault here. Although, if dogma works for you, maybe that would be ok, too, because I think, for example, you look at Hasids, Hasidic Jews, well they’re very dogmatic. They have penetrated through and found the essence of that dogmatism and have transcended the ordinary. If you look at, for example, there’s a wonderful little book called “Your Word is Fire” based upon Hasidic masters’ prayers, and it’s just a beautiful little book. It’s an old one. I don’t even know if it’s available anymore.

Guy: Ok, believe what you will. We will leave it at that. So, Larry, can you recommend two goto books, trauma­related or not, that have influenced you and the work that you do?

Larry: Well, I saw that in the list of stuff, and there was one that, when I first started back in the ‘70s—no, back in the ‘80s, early ‘80s—that was written by Arthur Egendorf called “Healing from the War.” That book probably helped me more in forming my own focus in treatment than any other book. Other books that have really influenced me have all been from Sufi people, and I don’t know if your listeners are interested in that or not.

Guy: Well, I think so. I think this podcast is interested in what’s inspired you, so obviously Sufism has inspired you, so if you definitely want to share one of those, I’d love to put those up on the show notes page.

Larry: Well, there are so many. Hazrat Kahn wrote “Spiritual Psychology,” which was a very important book. It took me, though, probably about eight or nine readings before I started to understand what he was really talking about. Initially when I read it, I just sort of

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dismissed it, but the more I looked at it, the more I saw that he was really going far beyond my ordinary way of thinking and getting much deeper into things. That is something of a difficulty with reading mystical literature, is that the mystics think about things differently than how we do. They see a different world. For them, we’re like children playing with toys. They’re not interested in those toys, but they love us because we are children and they care for us. That’s their purpose, is to love and care for us. I think that they exemplify, to me, who we could be, if only we would be what we might be.

Guy: Well said there. Number one, “Healing from the War” and “Spiritual Psychology” are the two books. Larry, it’s been awesome talking to you. What’s the best way for our listeners to get in touch?

Larry: Well, I guess my cell or email. Email is ldecker@cox.net . My cell is 805­220­8142. I’m happy to talk to people if I can.

Guy: Ok, I’ll put that contact information up on the show notes page at thetraumatherapistproject.com. So, the book is “The Alchemy of Combat” published by Omega. Larry, I wanted to thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I really appreciate it.

Larry: Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate that. You said this was going to be published somewhere?

Guy: This is going to be on iTunes. I’ll send you the links. It’s also available on Stitcher Radio. Yeah, it’s going to be published on Veteran’s Day.

Larry: Wow, well thanks so much, Guy! You’re doing great work. I really appreciate it.

Guy:alright, Larry. Thank you.

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Larry: Thank you.

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4. Edward Tick.

Guy:alright, Ed. Obviously just a little bit about you. Kind of take a moment, share with our listeners where you’re calling from and what it’s like there, and then we’ll dive in.

Ed: Ok, well welcome to all of our listeners, and thank you, Guy, for this service you give to our trauma community and survivors. To our listeners, thank you for whatever service and sacrifice and suffering you’ve been through in your own motivation to help health us all. So, it’s great to be with you, Guy, and with all of you. I’ve been working in the trauma field my entire career. We can talk about my background, but I did inherit trauma quite significantly from my religious cultural familial background and personal history. So, I grew up with it and surrounded by it and needed, of course, to find my own way to heal myself as well as learn how to operate effectively in the trauma field and with other survivors. I have been working with our veterans since the mid­ to late­1970s, before posttraumatic stress disorder was even a recognized diagnosis. I think we all know that didn’t occur in our modern world until 1980. I was in the vet community working with war trauma right after the Vietnam War and before there was support for veterans as there is today, before the trauma field was much developed. It was quite clear to me from that early work that war and other forms of violent trauma are so severe, so comprehensive, affect us at the deepest levels, that we had to learn how to do really deep work, travel through the underworld together, and find new and holistic and nonconventional, spiritually­based practices for healing trauma. So, I’ve been studying, researching, practicing that holistic perspective all these decades while I serve our people who have served.

Guy: Wow. So, we are going to dive into that as you kind of alluded to. Let’s start out here with a quote. This podcast really is about getting to know you, your journey, what’s kind of fired you up, in a sense. Share

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with our listeners a quote, a passage, whatever it is, something that’s inspired you along your path.

Ed: Happily, thank you. There’s so many we can choose from world history and world warrior traditions, so I spent some time thinking about many of my favorite quotes and what to share with you and our listeners. This quote, I come back to this all the time. I use it in my veteran healing retreats, and I will share this one today. This is a brief quote from one of our great American warriors, Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull, like other Native American and indigenous warriors, sang songs, wrote poetry, danced, used many of the expressive arts for warrior support and healing. Of course, that is in the Native American and indigenous traditions and something that some of us work to return to our veterans. Well, this particular quote from Sitting Bull is the song that he composed and sang as he was being initiated as head chief of all Lakota people to resist the white incursion on the homelands. Sitting Bull sang to his people simple three lines. It’s like a haiku. He sang to his people, “Ye tribes behold me / The chiefs of old are gone / Myself, I shall take courage / Ye tribes behold me / The chiefs of old are gone / Myself, I shall take courage.” I’d like to share a few thoughts about why this song and Sitting Bull’s motto has been so important to me.

Guy: Yeah, please.

Ed: One is if you look closely at the song, the first line “Ye tribes behold me,” our warriors and other trauma survivors are isolated from the community, and there’s a terrible chasm in our society and in most modern societies—not all—between those who serve and civilians. Sitting Bull declares, and all indigenous traditions teach that the warriors and the civilians have a profound relationship and mutual responsibility for each other. So, Sitting Bull immediately is saying, “Tribe people, behold your warriors. We have to be in this together. We need your support and tending just as you need our protection.” So, that first declaration, warriors and civilians must be in service together before, during, and after

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military service. A little more about Sitting Bull, if you don’t mind. Sorry. “The chiefs of old are gone” refers to, of course, the fact that the Native American population was being decimated, and the elders and the warriors were being killed off. It also refers to warrior spirituality that the Native Americans and other traditions believe that the soul has an afterlife, an eternal life, that our spirits go to the Spirit World and that in some sense, the elder chiefs and warriors are watching over us and can be accessed and also can be role models for us. Sitting Bull was trying to achieve that ideal of the elder spiritual warrior. Then, when he says, “Myself, I shall take courage,” he reminds us all that to walk the warrior’s path takes extraordinary amounts of courage, determination, perseverance, and those good warrior qualities. Now Sitting Bull, we all know that he was a great chief and warrior, but he’s played many other roles in his society. The one that was most important to him and he said was most important to his people—I’m working to help, more than study this. I want to restore it—Sitting Bull said the most important role he played was a medicine chief of the Hunkpapa warrior society. What that meant was that he was responsible for the spiritual healthcare and wellbeing of all of his warriors. He said, just like George Washington said, two fathers of our country, that if our warriors are well, then the people in the society will be well, but if our warriors are suffering and fall, then our entire society will crumble. So, they both teach that warriors are linchpins in a healthy culture, not for the aggression that they might serve, but for facing violence, serving the people their entire lives and actually facing violence down and keeping the society healthy and well­ordered. So, Sitting Bull gives that model. George Washington gives some more teachings, and that model of medicine chief of warriors, that we have to bring holistic psychospiritual and cultural tending and healing to all of our warriors and that the tribe, the society is responsible for it. It can’t just be relegated to folks like you and me, Guy, and our listeners. It can’t just be relegated to the professionals, but everybody has to carry the

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pain and the burden, the challenge, and the responsibility for these traumatic wounds.

Guy: Yeah, that’s just really super inspiring. I’m just thinking to myself, I’m imagining how we moved away from that integration of civilian and warrior. Obviously, it seems like a research project and a book unto itself and why we moved away from that. It seems like the work you’re doing, Ed, obviously is founded on reintegrating, again as you said, that psychospiritual work, which is so profound. Part of me just feels like it’s so sad, in a sense, that we moved away from that.

Ed: Yes, it’s sad and it’s tragic and it is a profound danger to our country, to our democracy. What you and I are talking about right now is not only for our veteran and military healing, though that is of course of utmost importance. They are on the frontlines for all of us, whether or not we agree with the wars we’re still responsible for our warriors and their wellbeing. Beyond that, we both know, and I hope our listeners realize how few people are serving today. Less than one­half of one percent of eligible people serve in our military, and they are being recycled again and again and again. We all know about multiple deployments and how deadly they are over time. I work with people in Special Forces who have had a many as 15, 16, 17 deployments, and they’re only in their late­20s to mid­30s. No human being can tolerate this amount of violence, pain, stress, and being in life­threatening conditions for so long. So, we are recycling a few number of people and burning them out while the rest of the population escapes responsibility. That doesn’t work, and the more we do that, the more the military becomes a specialized group. It is transforming itself into what the military is calling the profession of arms. That specialized group is at the beck and call, of course, not just of the politicians but of the corporations who are really making much of our politics today, especially overseas politics. So, we have good American young men and women, and older men and women serving today, believe at first that they’re serving American ideals, then coming back from

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Afghanistan or Iraq or other places of combat saying, “I went as an American warrior thinking I was protecting the homeland, but overseas I learned I was just a mercenary for the corporations.” There is severe disillusionment and frustration in the military and veteran communities because of this. We really do need to realize there is no protest and no civilian correction of the use of our military today, in significant part because most people aren’t challenged and threatened by service. During Vietnam, massive protests occurred, in significant part because of the draft, and people or the families didn’t want to serve in Vietnam, so they took a political stand. Now, that has been wiped out, and so our democracy really is threatened because civilians aren’t correcting and directing our use of the military. I’ve worked with soldiers who are going overseas on the way to their deployment, and they’ve said to the civilians, “You want me to take care of myself, but I can’t. I have to take care of the other soldiers and fulfill the mission. You civilians must take care of us, and if you don’t like the way we’re being used, it’s your job to make your voice heard and correct this challenge to our democracy.”

Guy: Ed, this is just becoming more and more clear to me from listening to you talk how multifaceted this is. I’m thinking I’m going to get you on and talk about something, but not only your passion, but what you bring to this table, in a sense, I think is making me realize, and I’m sure our listeners realize how it’s not just us, as you said. This is a whole society, a national issue, in a sense.

Ed: Yes, it’s a national issue on so many levels. We know, as trauma therapists, and our colleagues certainly know the degree to which a traumatic breakdown leads to many of our key social ills. So, in my specialty among our veteran and military populations, we know that there is extensive— well, the suicide rate is astronomical—and in all the wars since Vietnam, more people have committed suicide than were killed in the wars. So, service itself is more deadly than the combat zone, now. We have massive suicides, substance abuse, divorces, sexual traumas and

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acting out child neglect and abuse, criminality, so­called accidents, some of which might be on purpose or unconsciously motivated, homelessness, unemployment. We can go through every one of our social ills, and we find that military trauma survivors manifest these ills in their lives and their families’ two to three times the extent of the general population, which means our society is significantly breaking down along all of these lines. Many of these social ills have their origins in trauma, not only military trauma, of course, but street violence, inter­city violence, dysfunctional families at home. Really, I believe that most of us as therapists are, aware of it or not, dealing with the effects of living in a very violent and traumatizing culture, world, and historical era. This really is the source of many of our social ills, and so every one of us working in the trauma field, we’re good people trying to help the other wounded, but we really do need to realize the full scope of this wounding, that our entire society is in a traumatic social disorder—that’s one of the ways I translate PTSD—posttraumatic social disorder, and that we have to heal on all these levels, and that it can be, in some cases, even more important to work in the community to teach the community about trauma and how communities can be safe, healing environments and transform the community, not only focus on psychotherapy for the survivors, as important as that is. One of your important questions, in preparation, was, “What clinical errors might we have made in the past, working with trauma?” The one I would focus on is just this, that we can do great healing work as therapists, but follow­up is of critical importance. When we return people to communities that don’t understand their traumatic wounding, don’t support their healing, perhaps don’t even believe it’s possible, then they can collapse into the traumatic would again, even if they’ve done great healing with their therapists. One quick story I have about that is my organization Soldier’s Heart and I run intensive trauma healing retreats all over the country. We’ve done about 40 retreats in the nine years that Soldier’s Heart has been an organization. At one of our early retreats, a young marine who had been deployed several times, he did great work, was hopeful, inspired, embraced his warrior­hood, said

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he’s going to work hard on the wounds, took a vow to give up alcohol and get into family therapy as well as his individual therapy, went home hopeful and inspired. He went back into his home region where his family didn’t understand trauma, that trauma could be healing, that he was trying to be on a healing path. He went back to his VA therapist, who said to him, “That retreat you just went to was BS. There is no healing from PTSD. You are stuck with it the rest of your life. Get used to it, and learn to manage the symptoms.” So, this vet crashed after that. Rather than reaching out again where there was hope, he unfortunately believed that feedback, couldn’t find any support in his community, and really picked up the bottle again and went downhill. So, it is critical to have the community involved, to have support at home and in one’s home neighborhood. That affects the treatment a lot. Again, we’re not just working on our survivors. We have to work with the family and the larger social system.

Guy: Ed, let’s shift here. I want to find out how you got here. People get into this field for a variety of reasons. I often share my story with my brother who was in the Special Forces and came back with PTSD from Iraq. I just pestered him and bugged him because I was so excited to find out what he did, what went on, but went about it in the wrong way, certainly. How do you get into this field with all this passion for the holistic work and psychospiritual work? What got you here? Tell us the story.

Ed: Ok, I’ll tell. This is a great story. This is the beginning of how I got here and partly why I’m still in it. I came of age during the Vietnam War. I began protesting the war in high school. I never trashed our troops. I never protested against them as many people did, but rather—actually like the Vietnamese—our GIs serving in Vietnam were victims of the war, and the Vietnamese said the same thing during the war. Ho Chi Minh actually said, “Don’t hate the American GIs, even if we have to fight them and kill them. They’re also victims of this war who just want to go home to their

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families, just like us.” So, I felt that way, too. My father was an MP at the very end of WWII, stationed stateside, but as an MP. My grandparents were Russian and Polish­Jewish immigrants who survived the pogroms. We did lose one uncle in the Holocaust, that we know of, and so of course there’s this familial and cultural inheritance of trauma in my lineage. In addition to that, there were familial and personal traumas along the way, as well, including the little family delicatessen that my father and grandparents owned burning down on my 10th birthday, literally as we lit my birthday candles. Back then, I thought, “Oh my God, it’s my fault.” The fire on my birthday cake and the fire that wiped out our family’s little bit of security all happened at the same moment. I had to make sense of that, too. So, fast­forward from my family history and relatives traumatized in service, to family traumas as I was growing up, to the Vietnam era. To make a long story short, the student deferments were eliminated. The lottery system was put in place. I received a high lottery number and then was not eligible for service at all. That was insane to me. That seemed even more immoral and abusive to the generation that had to serve than anything that the leadership had come up with before. Some people just quit college because they weren’t in danger anymore. Other people fled because they knew they were going to be drafted. It was a traumatic social time. I felt wrong. Not guilty, because I didn’t want to serve in that war, and I didn’t believe in that war, but wrong in a different sense. I felt incomplete as a man for not giving service. I did have the sense that so many men have of military service is supposed to initiate us and test us, and I was never tested. Like you, I really wanted to know what our veterans had experienced. Just as you wanted to pump your brother, “Tell me your stories. I want to somehow witness this walk and do it with you.” I felt the same way about our Vietnam veterans. I really wanted to know their stories. Unlike much of the generation, I wasn’t repelled by them, and I

didn’t judge them. I was attracted and fascinated and was looking for people who tried to fulfill the warrior archetype and service to our nation

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in moral ways. I wanted to know what happened to them and why it went so bad. So, I moved to a rural part of central New York State in 1975, the year the war ended. Let’s remind everybody that in two weeks, April 30 of this month is the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. There are events going on around the country, and people should really think about what this anniversary means to them. Well, during the mid­ to late­70s as a beginning therapist, I worked with three combat veterans by Christmas of 1979. I was so upset with what I was learning, how alienated and in pain they were during Christmas, which is supposed to be a time of peace and renewal, celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace. That Christmas, I wrote my very first article about veterans. It was an op­ed piece for my regional newspaper about what Christmas is like for returned Vietnam veterans and how lonely and alienated and hurting they were and the society’s responsibility to reach out to them. It was published on Christmas Eve, and then a couple of days later I got a phone call from the president of the regional Vietnam Veterans of America chapter, who said, “You’re the guy who wrote that story about us?” I went, “Uh­oh” to myself, but, “Yes sir, I am.” He insisted that we have a meeting. We spent much of the day together. He told me his entire story. He tested me to see what my story was, why I was working with vets, if I was sincere or trying to capitalize off them in some way. Finally, he said, “I’ve heard enough. You’re coming down to our post.” It was just turning 1980, and PTSD as a modern diagnosis has just been put into the DSM. So, he said, “You’re coming to our post to talk to my vets about this new name and label for our wounded you have.” I said, “Well, thank you, but I can’t.” He said, “What do you mean, you can’t?” “Well,” I said, “I’ve only worked with three combat veterans so far.” He said, “I know. I’ve talked to all of you healing and counseling types in this county. That makes you our regional expert.” Really, I laughed, too. I said, “I can’t do it. I wasn’t there in Vietnam. I haven’t been in the military. The guys won’t trust me.” He said, “It doesn’t matter. I trust you. I’ve talked to you all day. The guys need you, so they’ll listen to me if I say give him a chance.” I said, “Thank you, but I’m sorry. I don’t think it’s right, and I’m not ready. I

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can’t do this.” He leaned across the table to me, stared me in the eyes deeply, and said, “Tick, I’m not asking if you want to talk to my post. Nobody asked me if I wanted to go to Vietnam. You’re drafted.” That was one of the actually high moments of my life. I didn’t want to be drafted for Vietnam, but being drafted at home by a vet to serve our veterans was an extraordinarily moving and important moment to me. It signaled my own initiation and coming of age. He drafted me into service, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Guy: What a story, Ed. Man, that’s a goosebumps story. I mean, you are just so intense. There’s no other word for it. You can feel the passion you have for helping our veterans, and I love it. I mean, this is why I’m doing this podcast, really. I get to talk to people like you. How did you get into the whole psychospiritual, the holistic treatment idea? Where did that come from?

Ed: I’ll share a few dimensions of that. One is I’m going to go back to that same day. We always have to look at our own lives and wonder, “When were the gods and goddesses talking to us, and what were they saying?” Some very strange things happen, like being drafted in that way. On my 10th birthday, the same day that we got the news that my father’s store was burning down, just a couple of hours before that—I grew up in New York City. At the time, a school child could get his adult library card on his 10th birthday. I had been waiting for years to get it and go up to the adult section and take out the really good books. So, after school I walked to the library. I got my card. I

went into the adult floor of my neighborhood library, and scout’s honor, I had no idea what book to take out. I was just wandering the stacks, and it was as if some power pushed a book off the shelves and fell into my hands. Oh my God, it was “The Iliad,” Homer’s great epic of the Trojan War. So, I was 10 years old. I looked at it. I said, “Ok, if this is what I’m supposed to read first, I’m taking it home.” I did. I devoured “The Iliad.” I became passionately interested in mythology and what we now call

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archetypal psychology from that age on. I studied it my whole life. So, in that sense, I grew up with the awareness of the spiritual dimensions behind warrior­hood as well as the family history of trauma. I was always going back and forth between, well, Achilles and Hector, the traumatized warrior and the noble warrior, the good guy and the bad guy, the one who could hang on to their principles and fight for the right cause and the men of honor, nobility, no matter what versus those who were destroyed by their service. So, I was aware of that before I ever got involved with veterans. I kind of grew up learning and developing that, and also being surrounded by WWII vets and Holocaust survivors, I looked really closely at them to see who was functional and who not, what wounds were they still carrying, including my uncle, by the way, who was a medic at the Battle of the Bulge and was wrecked by it. He survived, but he was about the worst walking case of PTSD ever had. So, that’s my early introduction, but beyond that I was— now we flash forward into 1987. I’d been working with vets about eight to 10 years and realized by then that the wounding of war is so complex, so holistic, so deep and comprehensive that we need spiritual practices, wisdom, a spiritual path to walk through this. People who have been to war have been in a spiritual arena where life and death, good and evil, right and wrong is right there, upfront, in your face all the time. We’re not in Kansas anymore. We’re really in a different world when we’re in the military, especially when we’re in the combat zone. So, I studied the warrior traditions of the world and saw that, not only from Sitting Bull and the Native Americans, of course, but that spiritual principles and practices have been part of warrior­hood since the beginning of time in all indigenous cultures, in the Greeks, as we mentioned Homer earlier. Throughout the Bible, there are stories of massive war and trauma, personal and collective trauma. There’s also significant religious and spiritual guidance for how we must behave in the war zone and what we must not do and how we should treat warriors upon return. Nobody pays attention to those lessons anymore, but I went and did huge research in digging it up. Then, in 1987 I went on a solo pilgrimage to Greece to study the ancient citizen warrior tradition

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of Greece. How did they treat their warriors? How did they bring them home? How did they successfully reintegrate them? To what degree did or didn’t they have what we call PTSD, and how did they respond to it? I could tell stories from that trip, too, but briefly let me say that journey brought me many breakthroughs in my own growth and psychospiritual development and understanding, as well as revealing depths of old, but highly used wisdom about the spiritual warrior tradition. I came back from Greece saying, “Well, I’ve been doing this as an American.” I won’t tell the stories now because of our time, but I did have extraordinary encounters with sea turtles three times during that trip. The second time was on a mountaintop that took me three hours to hike up to the top. Then, coming out of the Temple of Poseidon was a sea turtle, about two and a half to three feet long. It was old and giant, and how do turtles get on mountaintops? Sea turtles, on their fins! I don’t know, but it was there. It met me. I sat in the trail, and we stared at each other for about 45 minutes, and then it left me on its flippers, slowly going down the mountain. I went into the sanctuary and just stunned. I was praying. I was contemplating. I was wondering what this meant. I’m still learning, but it certainly sent me back to the United States saying many things. One is there is a shamanic dimension to life. This broke through to me, and I have to go study with shamanic elders to learn what this means and how to practice their path. Secondly, I knew at the time that North America was called Turtle Island by the Native Americans and that I left the United States of America looking to better learn how to help our warriors, our veterans, and I was supposed to go back to Turtle Island and learn and study and practice the indigenous cultures of this continent with our native people, who did have a profound spiritual warrior understanding and journey through the life cycle. So, I did. I came back and found a shamanic teacher and did a 13­year apprenticeship with him so that I could learn their spiritual healing methods, especially those used by their warriors. I have been working with our Native American elders and warriors ever since. I’ve taken many of them to Vietnam from some of our reservations, been on the reservations working with them, and helped

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some tribes research with their own elders their warrior traditions and actually restore their fading warrior traditions in their communities on behalf of their veterans, the elders from WWII all the way through Vietnam into the new ones who are serving. So, I’m very proud of that partnership, also greatly honor our Native Americans, who, by the way, serve in the American military in higher proportion than any other ethnic group in our country. They’re still trying to fulfill that spiritual warrior path through American military service and put our alienated peoples together. So, it’s beautiful. That is a summary of how I got involved. Since then, I’ve been using spiritual practices for warrior healing modeled on Native American, Vietnamese, Buddhist, ancient Greek, Biblical, and other traditions. I study and practice this as much as I can and find meaningful contemporary ways to bring it to our military vets.

Guy: Ed, what advice do you have for therapists just getting into this field? The listeners here have varying levels of experience. Some are more experienced therapists who don’t think they’ve worked with individuals who’ve been traumatized. A lot haven’t even worked with veterans. Let’s kind of keep it specific to individuals who want to work with veterans, who are beginning to encounter veterans in their practice. What advice would you have for them to start getting their education going?

Ed: Sure. The very first thing I would say would be make sure you really want to walk this path with our veterans, our military, and other war trauma survivors. If you deeply feel curious, committed, and called, as you and I felt, then accept this work not as a technique that you’re going to apply. There are many, many, many techniques, of course, that we trauma therapists have and use, but the most important thing would be for counselors and therapists to realize and embrace that they—you, our friends out there—you, if you take up this work, will be on a profound spiritual and moral journey with your clients. You must descend into the underworld with them as their witness to the underworld. You must keep

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your heart wide open. You will hear, as the Book of Job says, “Things which I did not know, which were too great for me to see.” You will hear great things and terrible things and heartbreaking things, and you need to let your heart be open and broken by it and allow yourself to be transformed and changed. Doing therapy with severe trauma survivors is and should be an initiation for therapists, as well. We should stay really humble, not think we know the geography of the underworld, but rather that our clients who survived traumas become our underworld guides, teaching us the ways of the underworld until we really get familiar and comfortable walking down there in those infernal regions. So, be open­hearted, be humble, be changed, allow yourself to be changed, and find in yourself that deep, spiritual affirmation that says, “Yes, I want to do this—walk through hell with our survivors and let all of us be transformed by the journey.”

Guy: Yeah, I just think it’s so interesting that you’re not saying, “Read this book. Go to this workshop.” It’s almost a complete antithesis of that. This is a spiritual journey.

Ed: Yes. Yes, it is.

Guy: For me, that’s so exciting. I could see other people, “What book am I supposed to read? What technique am I supposed to use because they’re a veteran?” I can just hear a lot of people wondering about that, but this is a completely different, almost a paradigm shift in the way we work with people, in a sense.

Ed: I’m calling for that. Yes, I’m calling for a paradigm shift to realize that we as a nation, and really, as a world, that we are all inheritors of trans­generational trauma from many sources, that our society continues to act that out, and that we have to heal the spiritual dimensions and the moral dimensions of our wounding and our social disorder in order to really bring about change that will stop replicating these traumas throughout history. There are wonderful books for people to study with, of

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course, but it’s way better if people embrace this as a spiritual journey to which they’re committed first and that they are really devoted to transformational work in themselves and for all of us, and then use the books to guide and support that. First, be on the journey and be authentic with it. For our military and vets, they say, and it’s true because of what they’ve been through, that they have the strongest BS detectors, and they will test us. You know this too, Guy. Our warriors will test us to see if we’re really sincere, and if we can take it, they will tell us horrible stories to see if we can stay open. They will wonder if we’re going to reject them or judge them when they tell us their horror stories, and we have to find it in ourselves that spiritual place and staying utterly open, loving, compassionate, non­judgmental no matter what we hear. We grow in our ability to tolerate the exposure to pain and trauma through this practice. So, even doing the therapy is a spiritual practice for us.

Guy: What books have inspired you along your path? I know you talked about “The Iliad,” but give us two other books. They don’t have to be trauma­related, necessarily.

Ed: Ok, well then thank you. Then I’ll say, let’s include “The Odyssey” as well while we’re mentioning “The Iliad.” I do believe that everybody who works with military and veterans really need to read “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” That laid down the spiritual path of both decay and return that all warriors have to go through. The other ancient book I’d say is reread the Bible because likewise, that is loaded with trauma of all kinds from personal to collective, as well as all kinds of guidance for how to avoid it, reduce it, or heal it. So, those are ancient sources. The other ancient source I would highly recommend everybody read is “Black Elk Speaks.” There are so many important testimonies from our Native Americans, but “Black Elk” gives the most extraordinary healing vision as well as documenting what warrior medicine looked like among the plains people, how they sought to preserve it, how it decayed, and how we are all called to restore that vision. So, those would be my three favorite inspirational

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books that have plenty of trauma and healing in them, but they’re not written specifically as textbooks for responding to trauma.

Guy: Ok, so we’ve got “The Iliad,” “The Odyssey,” and the Bible, “Black Elk Speaks,” all of which we’ll have linked up on the show notes page at thetraumatherapistproject.com in addition to, of course, your books “War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” as well as “Warrior’s Return: Restoring the Soul After War.” Ed, what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you?

Ed: Well, my nonprofit organization is called Soldier’s Heart. Our website is simply soldiersheart.net . Our phone number is 518­274­0501. Email, they’ll go to my staff, and they’ll give it to me, simply info@soldiersheart.net .

Guy: Ok, just writing that down here. Ed, we talked a little before we started, and you asked how much time we had. Obviously, we don’t have enough time, it’s clear. But, this is amazing. You speak from the heart. You can feel it. I feel it. It makes me really want to do this work even more and better and become the best person along that journey I can for my clients, so I just want to thank you so much because you’re an inspiration. You really are.

Ed: Thank you so much, Guy. Back at you. You helping in your ways, not only serving people who have been traumatized, and especially helping children recover from it, I applaud and honor you for that. Get to our trauma survivors early, and we can do better healing and their lives don’t have to be as tortured. So, you’re doing it as well, and you’re helping to spread the word in this beautiful way. Again, we’re in it together, and I hope that all of our colleagues out there think that we are all collaborating to heal our collective wounds rather than competing with each other. We

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need to end that competitive, combative attitude and really all be doing this together. Happy to serve. Thank you, Guy.

Guy:alright, Ed. Take care.

Ed: You, too

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5. Tom Kavanaugh.

Guy:alright, Tom. Obviously just a little bit about you for our listeners. Take a step back, just share with us something personal, where you’re calling, for example, and then we’ll dive in.

Tom: I’m calling from Ventura, California.

Guy:alright, so not too far.

Tom: Right.

Guy:alright, how long have you been there?

Tom: Let’s see, about two years now.

Guy: Ok.alright, and what else do you got going on—family, anything, what else? Give us any kind of other personal nugget.

Tom: Yeah, I have two awesome children. My son is a firefighter paramedic. They call them a fire medic, by the way. He’ll be upset with you if I don’t say it the right way. He and his lovely wife and daughter live in Southern California. My daughter lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband. They have a wonderful life together, so all is good.

Guy: Awesome. Before we start, I just want to say thank you for your service. Marines are pretty awesome.

Tom: I appreciate your support. Thank you.

Guy: Yeah, definitely.alright, so let’s start out here. We start out here really getting to know you. I mean, this whole podcast really is about getting to know you, your journey, what’s inspired you. We start out

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with a quote or a mantra. Share with us, Tom, either a quote or a mantra, something that’s driven or inspired you in your journey.

Tom: One of the things that has inspired me in my journey is a search for getting smarter because I had a lot of trauma to my head, actually, as I was growing up, and never felt like I was quite up to par with everybody else, which is what happens to a lot of people who suffer trauma. They have traumatic brain injury or just trauma that affects the way that they thing, and so that’s what originally inspired me to look at what I would see for the future. What would make me feel as if I

was on par with everybody else? I said our currency for tomorrow is the intelligence that we create today. We have to continually create our intelligence because that’s really what’s going to give us the spending capital as we move forward.

Guy:alright. So, first of all there’s a lot of stuff in there I kind of want to hack. So, you said you had a lot of injuries to your head. Can I ask you what happened?

Tom: Sure. The first one that I can recall is when I was four I went down the hill on a tricycle, and they forgot to teach me how to put the brakes on. So, I went headfirst into a tree. That obviously split my head open around my eye. That was the first one. Then, when I was about eight years old, somebody was trying to teach me how to skate. Obviously I didn’t have a lot of balance at that point, so what happened was my skates went out from underneath me, and my head went straight back and hit the ice. I guess it bounced off because I was knocked out.

Guy: Oh, man. So, were these TBIs?

Tom: Well, I don’t think they had the terminology TBI back then, but I’m certain that the effects of it were that for sure.

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Guy: So, you said you had this search for getting smarter. When did that hit you? I realize things kind of evolve, but when did that solidify for you, in a sense?

Tom: Well, actually it was my whole life I was trying to figure out why I couldn’t get the computations or I couldn’t understand the strategies and so forth that everybody else seemed to get right away. It was pretty much my whole life. I remember that my ninth grade year I spent two hours after school every day trying to get algebra. I know a lot of people have trouble with algebra, but I don’t think it was to the extent that I did, although there were some other folks in my class with me who were having some challenges. I just never felt as though I could get it like everybody else could.

Guy: So, as we move on here, this, again, is about highlighting your journey, Tom to really getting into this field, working in the context in which you work. People get into this field for a variety of reasons. We have listeners from all clinical levels and skill. For me, as I’ve talked about, as I talk about regularly on this podcast, one of my main inspirations was my brother coming back from the Special Forces with PTSD from Iraq. I was just so excited to find out what he did, what his experiences were. I just bugged him and pestered him because he didn’t want to share, couldn’t share. I blew it. I just didn’t have the knowledge. This was many, many years ago, and as a result I’ve wanted to come back and help. Tell us your story. Tell us a story. Break it down for us, Tom. What got you into this field?

Tom: When I went into the Marine Corps, I heard a lot of the same stories that you just shared with me about your brother with other people. I lot of my friends were in Vietnam. I’m from that era. I missed it by six months, very fortunately. I didn’t have to go. However, I always had in the back of my mind that there had to be something that we could do to help these people along the way. I got diverted and re­routed into an entirely

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different career and spent 26 years in the automobile industry. When I decided to retire in 2006, I was exposed to a science called Neuro Linguistic Programming. When I started to study that, I discovered how much it could help people in business education and therapy. That therapy part really caught my attention because I guess it reignited the thoughts about helping people who went through those traumatic events. What I’ve discovered through the science of NLP is that it can help people who are war veterans. It can help people who are trauma survivors, and it can help people who are first responders, who see an overabundance or an overwhelming amount of trauma in their work. It ignited that passion in me to be able to figure out exactly what it was I could do to work with people. Not being a licensed therapist, I

wanted to look at it from a completely different perspective. I adapted the processes and took in some other modalities as well and created a process that’s content free. It helps people to learn how to let go of their attachment to the effects of trauma. They don’t have to get into all of the details and relive the details, which is exactly what you said happened with your brother. He didn’t want to talk about it, and most people who experience that kind of trauma don’t want to relieve the details that way.

Guy: You talked about being in the automobile industry for many, many years and found out about NLP. The founders of that—correct me if I’m wrong—is that Grinder?

Tom: Drs. Richard Bandler and John Grinder.

Guy: Ok. How did the connection in trauma happen, or working with veterans? When did that come into your scope?

Tom: One of the people I met in my journey in learning NLP and putting the word out that I was beginning to create a seminar business in teaching the process led me to a Marine Corps officer in the Annapolis, Maryland area. When I connected with him, we had an immediate bond. We both

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had an immediate identification with what the overwhelming need is in our country to help our veterans coming back from the war. One of the things I discovered about this war that makes the trauma so much different than the other wars in military history for our country is that the human mind is hardwired to fear two things: loud noises and falling. In every other military conflict, there’s always been some kind of notice or some kind of an awareness that the trauma was about to happen or a bomb was going to go off. Somebody would say, “Incoming!” and pass it on down. You could hear them. With an IED explosion, which is what our marines and troops go through, is there’s no warning. A loud noise, when an IED explosion goes off, and the concussion blast literally throws the body, which is falling. So, you have the two things we’re hardwired to fear automatically happen. That’s the foundation for what the onset of PTSD is. When I spoke to this Marine Corps officer, we decided to collaborate and move forward in affecting this in a way that would help people to the best of our ability to get through as many people as we could.

Guy: I just love how you kind of moved into this field. You said you started off many, many years in a different industry, and the succession of events led you into this field. That’s very common for a lot of the people I’m interviewing, and as I can imagine, too, for our listeners as well. So, as we move on here—and just as an aside, I want to, as we move forward, Tom, in this interview, give you the opportunity to get more specific about how you work with veterans using NLP because I think it’s going to be a fascinating story to hear—but right now let’s talk about an early mistake you made when you were working with someone. Every single Master Therapist or any individual who’s been doing this for many, many years has plenty of them. Share with us the story of one of yours and kind of how that impacted the work you do.

Tom: I would love to share that because it was such a great learning experience. My first client, what I call my Client Zero was a navy

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corpsman who had served two tours in Iraq and had been discharged with 100 percent disability for PTSD. He was the first person that the Marine Corps officer I met in Annapolis led me to. He was so bad he actually had a service animal to help guide him through life. When we connected—he was in front of me within two weeks after we connected —we sat down, and I picked him up at the airport and drove him over to the office and sat down. We did the work, and within four and a half hours his entire persona completely shifted. He had a massive paradigm shift, and we were really moving forward. I thought that this was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I thought I had come up with this remarkable technique, and it was wonderful, and it was just going to be this easy every time. So, once he was finished, of course he went on his way back home. I stayed in touch with him. One of the things that I didn’t realize was when you’re helping people release the effects of their attachment, to the effects of trauma, it’s like peeling back an onion. There’s always going to be another layer to look at because the human subconscious mind keeps memories that are too traumatic to deal with repressed until we’re ready to deal with them. Every time you peel one of those layers, more stuff comes up. What happened was exactly that. I had made the impression in my mind that this was going to be a permanent solution. Fortunately, the techniques that I taught him went a long way toward him overcoming most of this on his own, but I did get a couple of phone calls. I remember one of them where he called me up and he said, “I couldn’t sleep last night. It’s back.” Once you release your attachment to the effects, it’s not back. They’re gone. However, it might feel that way. I said, “Well, why couldn’t you sleep last night?” He said, “I had a dream, and I couldn’t sleep.” I said, “Last week I had some bad food. I don’t know what it was, but I woke up in the middle of the night with nightmares. I couldn’t sleep either.” He said, “You mean it’s normal?” I said, “Yeah, it’s normal for us every once in a while to not be able to sleep.” The mistake that I made was not educating him enough to what could possibly happen after the new him took over because they’re never going to be the same as they were. Most people I work with ask me this

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first question, “Can you just get me back to where I was before the trauma happened?” My response is, “Absolutely not, because you’re a different person today than you were then. You can be better than you were. You can be strong than you were, but you’ll never be back to where you were.” That’s really important for everybody to understand.

Guy: So, you’re working with this guy. I kind of want to hear what specifically you do with NLP. Is it just NLP, specifically? Because I know in your bio there’s a lot of different things you utilize. Share with us specifically what you’re doing or how you’re working with these individuals.

Tom: Well, because NLP deals with mainly process. It’s a modeling process in modeling excellence in all things. So, when you discover what works in an individual who’s a professional at something, you can model those techniques and those processes in someone else and cut down the learning curve. What I’ve done is adapted NLP so that someone who has trauma can learn how to release the effects of the trauma inside their own mind depending upon which processes they go through, whether they’re seeing a movie, whether they’re listening to sounds, or whether they’re experiencing feelings. So, NLP has allowed me to develop the process to work with each of those modalities that we live with in our world. Once they do that, they never have to actually speak about what they’re seeing, what they’re hearing, or what they’re feeling. All I have to do is ask them where they’re at in the process, where their emotions are, and then I give them other techniques during that process to help reduce the emotional feeling and to be able to let go of their attachment to it. They can retain the learnings from the event that they went through and then release their attachment to the negative emotions. Then, what I do is I’ll bring in, say for instance the questions from the Sedona Method, which I think Hale Dwoskin’s a genius when it comes to asking the right questions to get people to shift they’re thinking and letting go of emotions. I’ve combined that with the techniques of NLP to be able to help people empower

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themselves to let go. One of the things I recognize in trauma is that when someone’s thinking goes into that fight or flight state, their thinking goes back to the reptilian part of the brain, our beginning part of the brain which didn’t understand language. So, you have to get them to move out of that traumatic state. That’s where the Educational Kinesiology, or Brain Gym, comes in. So, I’ve combined all of those together. To answer your question, that’s how I did it.

Guy: There’s a lot here for our listeners and for myself to take in because it sounds like you’re drawing from a lot of different resources and modalities. Just to go back to this one individual you were citing, the model for your mistake as it were, you began working with him, and you said he had this amazing paradigm shift. However, there maybe could have been some more education about what he could have expected and to normalize that whole thing for him, which is crucial learning, I think.

Tom: It was absolutely crucial for me because it really helped me with the subsequent clients I worked with to be able to prepare them for things that might come up that they hadn’t anticipated.

Guy: Tom, you talk about different processes that people can go through or that we live our lives in. How do you decide on which one to work with a specific client? Or do you work with all of them at different times?

Tom: Well, I think that having a bigger toolbox of techniques available is one of the prerequisites of anybody who does our work. I don’t think anybody works with one specific approach. I think everybody in this field has acquired knowledge in other areas to help people, just through experience if nothing else alone. One of the things I’ve done is I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of these techniques myself so I could feel the differences shift. I could hear how the voice inside my own head would change.

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Guy: Do you work specifically with veterans or only with veterans?

Tom: Well, I work with veterans. I work with civilian people who have experienced trauma in the civilian world, and I work with first responders—police officers and fire department personnel, emergency room personnel, anybody who has had an overwhelm of negative experiences when it has to do with trauma.

Guy: As someone who is a veteran yourself and someone who now works with veterans— because this is a big topic in a lot of the interviews I do just working with veterans period—but what’s your perspective on the different challenges, maybe, of working with veterans? Advice you might share with our listeners about working with veterans? Share with us your perspective on that.

Tom: Sure, I think that working with our veteran community is critical to our success as a nation. That goes throughout history. I think that you’ll find that the history of how well a nation does is really determined by how well they treat their veterans, in a sense. So, working with veterans, to me, is a unique opportunity to experience the challenges that they go through because their world is structured in such a way that they can follow the rules, they can follow orders, and so forth. Trauma is something that doesn’t follow any rules. Trauma is something that’s different for every individual. It affects each of us on an individual level. I really believe that one of the challenges that we have when we help people overcome trauma is we need to give them a direction when they’re finished because 80 percent of someone’s life who has trauma is probably spent coping with the symptoms of the trauma. That’s my opinion. When you release attachment to the effects of that trauma, 80 percent of their life is now a void, and you’ve got to fill it with something because nature abhors a vacuum. Something has got to come in and fill that. I said, “Why don’t we give them a self­empowerment component?” So, I took the accelerated learning skills of mind mapping and photo reading, and I put

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those into the component process at the very end so that once they were released from the effects of the trauma, they would necessarily gravitate toward something that would come along that was positive and the accelerated learning skills they could now learn whatever they wanted or needed to learn to move forward in life to have a direction. Does that answer your question?

Guy: It does. I love the way you’re doing that. There’s something very hopeful, and it just makes a lot of sense. We know that the effects that trauma has on individuals and how things need to be replaced. You can’t just take something away and expect, as you call it, that vacuum to stay empty. You’re talking about mind mapping, photo reading. I’m going to have links up to all of this in the show notes page at thetraumatherapistproject.com under Tom’s episode here. Let’s kind of move on, Tom, and get to one of my favorite questions here, which is why. I believe it’s important we know why we’re doing something because I feel the answer to that really drives us along in what we’re doing. It inspires us. This is a little different than the question about what got you into this field in the first place, but share with us why you keep doing this day to day.

Tom: Well, I recently had an opportunity just a couple of years ago to participate in a program. It was called the NLP Mind Fest. My section in that process was titled, “Mending the Wounded Learner.” I think that when people go through trauma, they become wounded learners in a sense that they don’t know how to learn how to get out of the situation they’re in, and they don’t know how to learn how to move forward in life. They kind of become stuck. That has always resonated with me at a core level of my being. People who feel stuck are never going to be able to move forward unless somebody can help them. I think it’s incumbent upon all of us who have the ability to help people to do that as much as possible.

Guy: I can hear it in your voice, this driving force, and you said it out in the beginning. You had these experiences when you were a kid that you

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kind of can point back to, kind of connect the dots, if you will, that impacted your ability to learn. What was it, ninth grade? You’re spending these hours after school in math class, which I had to do, too. It brought back up a bad memory of mine. Thanks for that, Tom. But, you can hear it in your voice and how it’s driving you in what you’re doing. It’s really inspiring. I just think it’s so inspiring for our listeners to hear that. That’s exactly why I’m doing this podcast, so thank you for that.

Tom: You’re welcome. Absolutely.

Guy: You’ve done it a lot throughout this podcast, but let’s kind of hone in on some advice. Again, many of our listeners have different skill levels. They’re maybe just beginning their education of trauma­informed care and treatment. Some are licensed. Some are not. Some are counselors. Some are therapists. Some have been working in this field but don’t think that they’ve worked with individuals who have been traumatized. That’s a fact. Share with us some advice you have for individuals who are just getting into this field.

Tom: Well, I think I would suggest they do as much research as possible into all of the different avenues that are available to work with people who have experienced trauma. I know that might sound like a formidable task. However, I think the way that you find what resonates with you, what makes you passionate about it, and what gives you the confidence to move forward in this field is finding something that you can identify with that worked for you or that worked for someone that you worked with and knowing that you have 100 percent confidence that that process will work all the time. Now, not everything works for everybody, but at least some part of it will help shift people. I believe that if people were to study NLP, there’s a component of NLP which is titled “Time Line Therapy,” or “Time Line Techniques.” To me, that’s one of the most powerful modalities that I have to work with. There’s a book authored by Dr. Tad James on the subject of Time Line Therapy and the basis of personality. I

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would highly recommend that they would start with something like that. I would look at the sound program that is put out by a company called Centerpointe Research Institute. Bill Harris created a program that helps people develop a higher level of threshold for anxiety or for trauma or coping with stress. I’m personally a user of that program. I’ve used it for almost four years now, and I can tell you that it’s helped me tremendously in dealing with a lot of stressful situations. The other part is I would look at working with everybody that you can work with as often as possible to hone your own skillset, to be able to find out what your strengths are, and capitalize on your strengths and then study, study to work on the areas where you’re not as strong. I would recommend a couple of books. One of them is called “Delayed Posttraumatic Stress Disorders from Infancy: The Two Trauma Mechanism” by Dr. Clancy McKenzie, one of the most fascinating books I’ve read on the subject of trauma, and “The Resiliency Advantage” by Dr. Al Siebert. “The Survivor Personality” is one he wrote also, but “The Resiliency Advantage” was the first one I studied. It talks about how to become resilient in the face of trauma.

Guy: Is that it? I’m writing down a whole paragraph.alright, so that’s a whole lot here. So, we start out with your recommendation to do as much research as possible into the different avenues or modalities regarding working with people who have been traumatized to get to the point, really, where you can have 100 percent confidence that it’s going to work, in a sense. Also, you recommended Time Line Therapy and NLP. You referenced Tad James and his book, the sound program, which was put out by Bill Harris by, what was it?

Tom: It’s Centerpointe Research Institute. The name of the program is called the Holosync Solution.

Guy: Ok, the Holosync Solution. Again, I’m going to have all these links here. The other recommendation was work with everyone you can work with and as often as possible, really to hone your own skillset and to

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discover your strength and then go back and study where you need to fill in the gaps. Moving on, you recommended “Delayed Posttraumatic Stress Disorders from Infancy” by McKenzie and then “The Resiliency Advantage” by Siebert. Now, this next question is kind of moot in the sense that it’s “If you could recommend two books.” I mean, you’ve recommended already, I think, 10 so far. What books, aside from the ones you’ve mentioned, Tom, have influenced you or inspired you?

Tom: “The Sedona Method” by Hale Dwoskin. Phenomenal book. It’s a phenomenal program. I think the questions that are in “The Sedona Method,” if someone were to just sit down and go over those questions for themselves on every area of negative emotions in their past that they’ve kept alive in their mind, they would find a way to release or reduce a tremendous amount of them just by those questions alone.

Guy: Let me jump off here. Obviously, these questions I use are not set in stone, as I’ve said before, but you come across to me as someone, I mean you’ve got so much energy. You’ve got a lot of passion. How do you translate that into the work you do? What do you feel is one of your strengths as a clinician, counselor, therapist, whatever you want to call yourself, someone who’s helping individuals who have been traumatized? What do you draw upon?

Tom: I draw upon my own experiences, and I draw upon the knowledge that I’ve been able to acquire along this journey. Knowing that I’ve studied along with people who originate a lot of these processes, so I know that they work. I’m 100 percent confident and 100 percent congruent. When I sit down with somebody and they tell me that they want to change more than they want to take their next breath of air, then I can help them because making a decision is 90 percent of the work. The rest of it is just follow through. Once they make the decision, then

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all of their own personal resources align behind that decision to support them in achieving that goal.

Guy: Nice. So, let’s talk about what you’ve got going on here. I mean, I’m looking at your website right now. You’ve got a really good website, by the way. Share with us what’s up next for you. Are there trainings or anything you want to make our listeners aware of?

Tom: Matter of fact, on Thursday I begin Brain Gym 101. I’m going to be there with Dr. Paul Dennison, the creator of Educational Kinesiology. We have a four­day training that’s going to be here in Ventura. Then I’m a week off, and then my NLP practitioner­level class will be held here in Ventura for seven days. Then, immediately after that the NLP master practitioner class for nine days. Then, I’ll be teaching a mind mapping and photo reading class two weeks after that.

Guy: Can all of this be access on the calendar at your website?

Tom: Yes.

Guy: Ok, and that’s newtrainingstrategies.com . Again, I’ll have all those linked up.alright, Tom. What’s the best way, aside from the website, is that just simply the best way for people to get in touch with you?

Tom: My personal cell phone number is 805­746­5648. If you get my voicemail, it just means I’m probably talking to somebody else or working with a client, and I will return the call before the end of that business day.

Guy: Ok. It’s 805­746­5648.alright, Tom, you are a powerhouse. I mean, I just love talking to you, but seriously when I talk to people there’s something going on in my head saying, “Yes.” I want to refer a client to them. I would feel confident doing that. I certainly would feel confident doing that with you. I just loved the way you shared your story from the

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time you were a kid, skateboard, bike falling off, hitting your head and just how that really kind of created your passion, not only to help yourself but to help others. That is inspiring, so I want to thank you for that.

Tom: Thank you, Guy. I really appreciate it.

Guy: Yeah. So, we will talk soon, sir, and be in touch. Tom:alright. Thank you very much for having

me on the program.

Guy: Thanks, Tom.

Tom: Bye, now.

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6. Rick Bata.

Guy: Alright, Rick. Obviously I’ve just given our listeners a nutshell about you. Take a moment, tell us where you’re calling from for instance, and maybe what you’ve got going on as far as where you live, etc., and we’ll dive in.

Rick: Guy, I’m living here in San Jose, California. You mentioned some of the great highlights about what I’ve been doing. Probably first and foremost, I’m still on the clock under the umbrella of the Department of Defense and the office of the Secretary of Defense. I had the wonderful pleasure of traveling around the globe quite literally for almost six years to various installations, most of them via army, a couple of air force. Working with combatants coming back from down range and the ability to be able to work with their family members as well, it’s just a refreshness of coming back and bearing witness. What we did, Guy, we had something called the surge. We would have 20 of us civilians as contractors, all mental health practitioners master’s degree and higher, would do these 20­ to 30­minute interviews with returning soldiers, just trying to identify particular issues that might be happening: sleep issues, combat­related stress issues, in a confidential manner to where they could address some of their issues and not put themselves at risk. By putting themselves at risk, what I mean is when you’re an active duty soldier and you’re having issues from down range: nightmares, stress issues, numbing, self­medicating, it’s not a safe practice to go to installations of behavioral health or mental health. So, we had no paperwork, no notes, confidential opportunities to try to help these soldiers when they got back. It was just invaluable. We turned a couple of years ago in the midst of an assignment where I was up in Fort Lewis, Washington. My wife came down with a diagnosis of cancer. I had to jump off the road and come home to support her through the process. The treatment was much more

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brutal than the disease, and I lost her just before Christmas a couple years ago.

Guy: Oh my God. I’m so sorry to hear that.

Rick: Thank you. In the meantime, it’s a process of rebuilding a private practice. It’s very, very interesting. I’m told that it’s a two­ to three­year process to get back up and running. Year number one was just a wash. In the meantime, when you mentioned about the pro bono, I started heading down to Gilroy, California for something called DreamPower Horsemanship and a program called Horses for Warriors. That’s a volunteer, spending two hours every Saturday. I’ll be heading there when we finish this interview this morning down to Gilroy. It’s an opportunity for returning soldiers from both Iraq and Afghanistan to start building relationships with these incredible animals. When I began working with the horses, I had no idea, Guy. The only thing I thought that I knew was which end of the horse the whinny came out of. I’ve since learned it’s actually both, but learning a little bit more about the horses. The horses, actually, when the soldiers are working with them, they give instant feedback, and the bonding process begins. I think I answered your question. I got a little bit ahead of myself.

Guy: Yeah, no, no, no, no. That sounds really fascinating. I mean, you brought up so many things that I want to get into. Let’s kind of use this, Rick, to kind of move into the second part, if you will, which is our quote. This podcast really is about getting to know you, really with the help of inspiring other clinicians just getting into this field. Let’s start out with a quote, a mantra, something that’s inspired you, Rick, in your journey. What would you share with us?

Rick: This particular mantra, Guy, comes from junior high. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had a classmate in junior high that I absolutely knew I wanted to marry and grow old with and have babies with. That didn’t happen, but I will call her Angie. I grew up in a farm community in

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Northern Michigan up on the Canadian border. This is the late ‘60s, hitting junior high. I noticed about every six months, Angie’s mother would take her to the doctor for what turned out to be some sort of an ulcer. Back in those days, Guy, I think it was milk. Ultimately Pepto­Bismol was prescribed, sent her on home. A year and a half into this, the third time going to the doctor, the doctor became just brilliant and asked the question, “What’s going on at home?” Well, what was going on at home was she was being molested by her stepfather. Hence, there was the root cause of what was going on, and they were treating the symptoms. So, it stuck with me at that point, and it’s been with me all through my practice. Sometimes it’s screaming in my own head, “Let’s please stop treating the symptoms and get down to the source of what’s going on.

Guy:alright. Please stop treating the symptoms, just, I think, a phenomenal reminder about how oftentimes we get confronted with, really, what’s in front of us. Even with seasoned therapists like yourself, that can be something that we step into. So, you talked about junior high school, when did this become resonant for you in your practice? Was this something that has remained with you because of that time?

Rick: It’s absolutely remained with me because of that. Watching and learning—and I’m an EMDR practitioner certified in the process—it’s just one of the most profound therapies that I have had the pleasure of being able to employ. I was coming back, for example, just referring back to veterans, Guy, many of them self­medicate, and that is very, very common. The issue isn’t so much about the substance abuse. It’s about what’s underneath it, what’s the fire underneath the need to dissociate, to cover this on up. That’s my goal. I want to do the best that I can for whoever is sitting in front of me in my office, if we’re in that setting. So many things appear as symptoms, and I want to find out where they’re coming from.

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Guy: Right. So, Rick, what’s the lesson here for our listeners who are tuning in who maybe are just beginning their education into trauma­informed treatment? What’s the one­sentence take away for them?

Rick: Be mindful of how easy it is to put a label on or put something in a category because it looks like it’s right out of the DSM­V. Therefore, I think the issue is I think he’s an alcoholic. Before you put the label on there, gather all the facts.

Guy: Ok, before we put the label on, gather all the facts that we can get.alright. Awesome. So, again, this is about highlighting your journey to become someone who’s been doing this for many, many years, for decades. People get into this field for many reasons. I’ve often talked about my brother, and you mentioned as part of the introduction was your work with the Gulf War. That’s the place that my brother came back to, as a Navy SEAL with PTSD, and when he did, I was so excited to talk to him, to find out what went wrong. I just pestered him, Rick, and just on and on and on. Obviously it was the wrong thing to do, but it really kind of inspired me, in a sense, to get into this field and to help individuals move through their trauma, if you will, learn to manage it and thrive. Share with us what got you into this specialization.

Rick: Well, that’s a good question. I came from a military family where everybody serves, so it was implied. We were not wealthy, so college wasn’t an option at the time. All of us grabbed a branch of the military. I chose to go to Vietnam. I mentioned I’m Vietnam­era. I enlisted to go to Vietnam, and I can share the reasons in just a little bit. I’m probably one of the first people that enlisted in the army that the recruiter actually lied to. I spent—not what I wanted to, not what I enlisted for—I spent 32 months in South Korea waiting for my opportunity to go and serve in Vietnam. I’m blessed, and I’m real lucky that that didn’t happen. Since then, and when I got out back in the ‘70s I stayed involved just listening

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and paying attention to the veterans’ cause. I worked quite a long time putting myself through school. When I finally became an intern and got licensed, I realized I still care about the veterans’ cause. I started the pro bono work, and I found out that this is where I fit. Being a soldier, being a veteran is kind of like you’re in a club. We’re all a band of brothers, and that was the leading that was easiest for me, Guy.

Guy: But why trauma? What was it about that particular field?

Rick: If this is getting ahead of myself, believe it or not I think I’m one of those people that got into the field to find out why I was so screwed up. There’s a lot of folks that will talk about that little adage, that mantra that, “You know, I want to help people. I want to work with people.” Well, I used those same descriptions, but I was 56 years old on an assignment at Fort Riley, Kansas when I had a breakthrough. Out of the blew came the fact that I had been abused by the Catholic Church for four years as a little boy, and I didn’t know that. I had compartmentalized it, stuffed it somewhere. This was the push. This was the push. I didn’t know it my whole upbringing. I couldn’t figure out. I was self­sabotaging, drinking Southern Comfort at the age of 11 years old, stopping sports, all kinds of red flags my family was unable to see. I actually enlisted in Vietnam to go to Vietnam, actually to put me out of my misery. So therein lied, “My God, what’s this all about?” Trauma became just the magnet that gravitated toward it. Lots of therapy, of course, after the fact, as we all did as we became licensed, but just alarming for me. That was only four years ago, Guy, that that breakthrough came through. That was my drive, and interestingly enough when I found out what the cause was for me getting into this field, and especially trauma, for a short time I

entertained the thought that, “I found it. I don’t need to be a therapist anymore.” I found exactly what it is that was going on with me.

Guy: Wow, I mean, a really powerful story. So, as a young kid you were going through this, as you said, compartmentalized what you’d been

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going through despite these red flags that your family didn’t see. What really stood out to me, Rick, is you’re saying you went to Vietnam to get out of the misery that you’d been experiencing.

Rick: Yeah, I wanted the pain to stop, absolutely.

Guy: Wow, and then coming back and then still, as you said, as a veteran just keeping your ear to the veterans’ causes. Would it be fair to say that there was a kind of subconscious drive to help these individuals, because of what you’d gone through?

Rick: Thank you. You said it very well

Guy: Yeah, wow. Phenomenal. Thank you so much for sharing that story, having done that, Rick, and sharing the mantra that you did and moving forward to telling us how you got into this field. Let’s take a step to the side, in a sense, and talk about the challenges of working in this field. Share with us an early clinical error and what you learned from that. Obviously, how we learn from failure as clinicians is crucial. Everyone has failures or mistakes, whatever you want to call them. We continue to do so, but share with us an early one and how that’s impacted the work you do.

Rick: Great question, Guy. In the beginning we are all so eager, and we’re learning, and we’re trying on different hats and different applications. I was more into cognitive­behavioral world than domestic violence. It was primarily psycho­educational, so more of it teaching in a class and giving them some behavioral techniques to take home with them. But, in my private world, I kept looking for something that could be quicker and more effective. I think, like most of us interns and therapists, I’m sure there were just a bundle of mistakes that were made. In hindsight, looking back, I wish I had done this, I wish I had done that differently. I wish I had learned what confrontation really means. I think the biggest gaffe that I had was a business associate, a fellow therapist. When I found EMDR

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and went through the training, I thought it was just the new widget. I’d never seen anything so profoundly rapid in terms of relief for the symptomatology in my clients. What I’m guilty of is everything that was ever mentioned about therapy, I would always suggest, “You need to try EMDR,” to the point that I lost a friendship because I couldn’t not talk about EMDR. So, I think being over­zealous, over­eager, that’s probably my biggest gaffe. I’m guilty as charged along with all the other ones that we’ve all done on our way up.

Guy: So, let’s kind of get more specific because we can learn from the specifics of the story. So, you had a friend that you just wouldn’t stop talking to about EMDR, and what happens?

Rick: Well, then I just turned him off. We were having a business meeting about how we could support each other in our private practices and grow. He’s in the relapse prevention field and probably very successful in what that approach is. I guess I just beat it to death, Guy, is what I did.

I was so excited that I just couldn’t stop, and suggesting, of course, not that he didn’t have better clinical judgment than I, but I just knew that if he applied this, this could have such a rapid effect on his clientele. A little ego involved, I think.

Guy: Let me kind of press you here, a little bit. What about working with combat vets? Where have you kind of faltered in that area?

Rick: Learning, which you probably did with your brother. I didn’t serve in combat, so I let them know that immediately. There’s a real getting into this particular population that they don’t trust civilians. It just comes with the territory. So, I’ve always had to qualify, as long as I’ve been doing pro bono and as long as I was traveling with the government, the very first question they ask is, “Did you serve?” If I didn’t, they leave. They’re not going to talk to me. They’re not going to share. So, the biggest thing is

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having been able to qualify for that. In the beginning, asking questions—and this is probably a better answer for you, Guy—asking the direct questions instead of practicing just shutting up and listening. There’s nothing more important with the veterans. They just need to tell their story, and we need to be quiet.

Guy: So, if most of the veterans who come in to see you or someone who hasn’t served, if that’s their first question, and the answer is, “No, I haven’t,” how do you bridge that gap?

Rick: When I asked the folks that I supervised and I’m working with, somehow there’s a connection to somebody that served somewhere in the family. When they’re able to say, “You know, my grandfather served in WWI,” or, “In WWII and the Korean War, my brother was in the Gulf War,” that will get you to be able to have a conversation with somebody. Most of us know somebody, or we can say, if we don’t have that, say, “I’ve just been interested in the cause for a long, long time. I’m very interested in how everybody’s being treated.” It’s about being honest and not probing.

Guy: Yeah, and I think certainly the way you’re coming across in this interview is, in a way, with a lot of compassion, a lot of patience, a lot of calmness, and I’m sure that kind of translates to the work you do. I think, again, a lot of people who are listening to this podcast have an interest in working with veterans. So, I think this is really useful information. Of course, as therapists, we always hear that that’s one of the difficulties, that whole trust issue.

Rick: Building rapport, it doesn’t matter what the approach is, is still just paramount. There’s nothing more important than building that relationship. With these folks, they’re a little bit gun shy, pardon the expression, and a little leery. It’s worth taking the time. The ministry of

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presence, just bearing witness, because they’re only going to talk about what they feel like talking about at any given time. We need to honor that.

Guy: Is that a challenge sometimes, just because we’re human beings, as one of my past interviewees has said? Talk about the challenges of bearing witness and being present and how you manage that.

Rick: Working with the active duty military that had just come back from down range, Guy, so many of them shared stories that were so horrific, so far out of the normal human experience, as probably with your brother. Horrible things with battle buddies, they bear witness to them passing in front of them, holding onto them, the atrocities of war. War is never good, and trying not to, in that very moment—because they’re looking for a reaction—and learning how to turn it down for myself as my eyes are bugging out, and inside my head I’m thinking, “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.” Just try to validate. Try to normalize. This is their experience, and I need to just get out of the way. They read body language real well, so I hope I’m answering that for you. Bearing witness sometimes is just really holding on tight and trying to be in the room. It’s hard.

Guy: I really appreciate your honesty in saying that even someone with your years of experience, that still can be a challenge because here we are sitting with someone who, as you said, is sharing these horrific experiences, and to not have any kind of reaction would kind of imply that we’re robotic. I mean, how could we not? But when you say they’re looking for a reaction, they’re looking a reaction that what? Would mean that we can’t handle what they’re saying. Say more about the reaction they’re looking for, you think.

Rick: You started at one end of the spectrum. It’s like they know we can’t handle it, so sometimes there’s a little bit of detest in there. The other part, you’re dealing with grief and loss all the time. When I was running some psycho­educational groups, people would say, you know, somebody in the group lost a family member, somebody died. “I don’t know what to say to

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these people. What do you say?” I would teach them to say something, say, “Sorry for your loss.” Say something. Sometimes with the veteran, because they’ve lost an awful lot, that’s what you say. I’m so sorry that happened. I’m so sorry you lost your battle buddy. I’m so sorry that’s what you went through. It must have been hard. The normal therapist relationship.

Guy: Right. I think we, as clinicians, oftentimes—especially individuals who are just getting into this field—there’s a lot of hesitancy about that particular dynamic and that particular confrontation. There’s the question about what to say, or if I say anything I might re­traumatize that individual, or there’s that initial fear. I know it because I’ve seen it with colleagues who don’t want to work with individuals who have been traumatized or don’t think they have worked with individuals who have experienced trauma.

Rick: You know, I understand that. Some of my colleagues talked about, when I got into the domestic violence arena, they would never do that. “Rick, I can’t imagine working with that population.” It’s not for everybody. Some folks, that’s just not their cup of tea. They don’t want to work with the sexual pedophiles. Some don’t want to work with veterans because they’re violent. It’s not necessarily an acquired taste, but trauma­informed care, I think you referred to. I finished an online—which is really the focus here in Santa Clara County—an online class about traumainformed care for veterans and their families. Knowing about the population, as much as you can learn about the population you’re working with, the better it is. If you know some of the symptomology of PTSD and traumatic brain injuries, the most horrific thing that’s being taught right now, Guy, is I learned it isn’t so much PTSD as it is moral injuries. These soldiers, the recruiting marines, army soldiers, they’re traumatized with moral inventory, meaning, “I saw something I shouldn’t have seen. I did something I shouldn’t have done, or I didn’t do something that I should have done.” That’s the reconciliation, the reconciliation of some of them

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having to do their job. We know what that means when you’re a soldier or a marine. The indoctrinations we had as kids, thou shall nots. When somebody has to go through and do their job, they’ll live with that for the rest of their life. This is really needing to know who’s in front of you in session and what they’ve been through.

Guy: Yeah, very powerful. I love that distinction and the way you kind of tease that out. The difference between the PTSD symptomology and the moral injury, that right there I just think is a gold nugget for our listeners to hear, and when you’re in session with someone, being able to just be aware of that. That’s awesome.alright. Rick, we get to one of my favorite questions here, which is why we’re doing this. I just feel it’s really important because I think the answer to that question just drives us along in the work we do. I think you touched upon this maybe in the beginning of the interview, but share with us your why. Why do you continue in this field, the field of trauma? What’s keeping you going?

Rick: The successes. This population—and I know we’re staying a little bit specific with the veterans, but all populations—I work with a lot of folks who have been through horrendous crimes, auto accidents, traumas, traumas, traumas. But the relief of the symptoms, when they start to leave the house, when they stop isolating, when they stop self­medicating, when you see them starting to reclaim some of their life and their joy. They’re empty. They’re overwhelmed. They’re angry. They don’t sleep. There’s a book I’m going to recommend in a minute, Guy, that’s going to be real helpful for folks that are interested in working with veterans. But that just excites me about the affectivity of working with this population and the relief they get. When they can let go of— because trauma is stored in the body, is kind of the mindset. Something new that’s coming up that I’m working with is we’ve started introducing mounted horseback EMDR. I think we’re second in the nation doing that. It is very, very exciting, first, and I have never seen trauma processed so rapidly as I have a soldier on

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horseback. Looking up and seeing the look on their face, it’s just, to me, it’s the reward. That’s my payment.

Guy: Wow, I’ve never heard of mounted horseback EMDR.

Rick: Yeah, it was kind of a whoops. My mentor was working with veterans back east that were having retreats, and they were doing EMDR therapy in the office, and they were doing some equine facilitated psychotherapy, and they were doing yoga. They were combining these three modalities with some great success. Well, I think I misheard my mentor, so I just started putting soldiers on the back of a horse because their gait produces what is referred to as the bilateral stimulation that is used in EMDR. It’s mind­blowing. I have not been this excited in a long time, so I think I answered that with just continued progress moving toward more effective ways to help get these folks back on their way, get their legs back under them.

Guy: Yeah, so just the successes keep you going, watching them get out of the house. I mean, something that seems so simple, and watching them being about to let go. I mean, obviously profound, profound things for these individuals. You’ve given our listeners so many great bits of advice, but let’s kind of see if we can hone it down here. Many of our listeners are just getting into this field. Some are just beginning their trauma­informed education. Share with us, Rick, what advice you could give to individuals just getting into this field.

Rick: First and foremost—I’m just using myself as the example—is make sure you work on your stuff or maybe addressing your own issues. I think there was a great level of denial when I finished up the master’s program and I was required to do 40 hours of therapy. I just thought, “I really don’t have any issues. This is just a waste of my time.” Find a great therapist. It makes us great therapists if we sit on the other side of that room for a number of hours, it really teaches us to be present with your future clientele. That’s first and foremost. Good supervision is the second thing.

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A really active, hands­on supervisor can guide and shape us and put us in the direction where we need to go.

Guy:alright, so first and foremost address your own issues. Obviously, that has come up again and again in these interviews. Find a great therapist. It makes us great therapists. It helps us, obviously, in modeling, in a sense. Get a really active, good supervisor. Awesome advice, and again, I think throughout this whole interview you’ve given so many other nuggets of advice.alright, we’re kind of winding down here. You talked about books. Besides Judith Herman’s “Trauma and Recovery,” what two books could you recommend, either trauma­related or not, that have impacted you?

Rick: The big one, “EMDR” by Francine Shapiro, which is one of my Bibles. Not everybody’s going to move in the direction of EMDR. I get that. This is just something that we’ve got our teeth cut at the VA, Menlo Park, and it works. It’s great if you want to work with the military. Exposure therapy, CPT, and EMDR seem to be the big three. So, EMDR is one of the first ones for me. If interested in working at all with veterans, there’s a book called “Down Range: To Iraq and Back,” and the author is Bridget Cantrell. It is the primer for both veterans and their family members and for us laypeople and for us therapists to have some real sense. It’s a very easy read. It’s very simple. It’ll change your world as to what you learn.

Guy: Wow.alright, first one is “EMDR” by Francine Shapiro and “Down Range: To Iraq and Back” by Bridget Cantrell. All of this information is going to be available at the show notes page at thetraumatherapistproject.com . Hit on the podcast tab, and Rick’s episode will come right up there. So, “Down Range,” what kind of book is that?

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Rick: It is, oh my God, it’s just something that’s handed out to all the of the active duty vets on every military installation in terms of army. Just a little paperback, very inexpensive.

Guy: Is it about the soldiers’ experience in a sense, or the serviceman’s experience?

Rick: It’s absolutely about the experiences. You can get them on amazon.com . I think they sell them for a penny. I normally have a stack; all the shipping and handling comes together. It’s a really good read. It’s a great understanding.

Guy: Awesome. Finally, what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you, Rick?

Rick: I’m offering my email address. Do you want me to say that, Guy?

Guy: Yeah, sure. Say it.

Rick: That’s rbata@aol.com . That’s probably the best way to get ahold of me.

Guy:alright, Rick. So, this mounted horseback EMDR, we have to stay in touch. I want to hear more about that. Horses for Warriors in Gilroy just sounds amazing. I just want to thank you so much for really opening up and talking about your own experiences and how that really has impacted the work you do. I just love your passion, and you have this presence in the way you speak and patience in the way you speak that comes through, and I just really admire that and appreciate that. Thanks so much, Rick.

Rick: Thank you, Guy. I appreciate your input.

Guy: We will keep in touch,alright?

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Rick: Absolutely.

Guy:alright, take care.

Rick: Take care, you too, Guy. Bye bye now.

7. Charles Figley.

Guy: Charles, I’ve told our listeners just a little bit about you. Take a moment, share with our listeners something personal about yourself, and then we’ll get into the subject of trauma.

Charles: Ok, well, first of all, I’m not the editor anymore, thank goodness, of Traumatology. That’s the only thing I would correct. Brian Bride at the University of Georgia is editing it now, and it’s part of the American Psychological Association’s journals. Yeah, the interest in trauma, I think, really emerged when I was in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, but not so much enduring combat, although I did that also, but in my free time I volunteered to work in the community. A group of us chose the Catholic orphanage there in Da Nang, and so we taught the kids American gangs, and at least I tried to teach English and help them with their pronunciation. It was there that I began to understand how kids, at least, react to traumatic experiences such as their parents being killed. When I got out of the Marine Corps in 1967, I decided that I was going to study human development with mindful of those particular kids. It was 1971 that I participated in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and threw back my medals out of protest for how horrible the war was and what a negative impact it was having on the kids that I worked with as well as the men and women that I served with. I guess I got bitten by the trauma bug in Vietnam for different reasons, but it really came to fruition when I started interviewing combat veterans because no one really was talking to

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them at that time. Indeed, they were rather feared. It was just sort of a natural, for me, migration toward doing research.

Guy: Ok, so we’re going to get into that. Obviously this sounds like a really rich topic here. I just wanted to find out where you lived. So, give us some personal information, just a short bit, and then we’ll start getting into it.

Charles: I was born in Chicago. I grew up in the Ohio area, but six years ago they recruited me to come to New Orleans to help rebuild the city, at least psychologically. My current focus, I live in New Orleans, I work in the community and all kinds of other places associated with disaster mental health.

Guy: Awesome. So, let’s use that to kind of transition to our first topic, which is the quote. You know, this podcast is about getting to know you, Master Trauma Therapist, with the goal of inspiring other clinicians. In order to do that, we want to hear, really, what’s inspired you. What’s kind of motivated you? Share with us a quote, a mantra, something that’s inspired or helped drive you on your personal professional journey.

Charles: Yeah, I thought about this quite a bit. I think the thing that characterizes, as I look back in particular, is the quote—and numbers of people have cited me, actually, mostly since my 2007 book on combat stress injuries—but I have to say that trauma is more of an injury that requires rehabilitation than an illness that requires medicine. It’s fairly straightforward and simple because for the vast majority of people who have survived a traumatic event, they’re not crazy. They don’t have PTSD. They may have symptoms, and yeah, some may develop that, but we as intervention, we as therapists, as human service professionals know this to be true, that there are people who have been affected by trauma, but there’s every reason to believe that they’re able to overcome the

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negative consequences, the negative memories. If they don’t recover immediately, of course, why would we expect them to do that? I run every morning with 16 pounds of weights for at least 30 minutes, but more often than not closer to an hour in the city park here in New Orleans. Invariably, I get sprains of various sorts. I’ve learned that, oh my, that my running is not over with, it’s just that I have to slow down. I have to attend to that injury and enable it to heal. It’s the same way when we’re exposed to a traumatic event. I can go into this anytime you want, but essentially when we’re faced with a trauma it forces us to address questions, and when we’re able to answer those questions then we move on. We’re informed by that experience. To think that experience will automatically, without much that we can do, lead to a mental disorder, is not only dishonest, but it is inconsistent with what kind of hope we want to impart for the patient, the client.

Guy: So combat, or trauma, you’re saying, is more of an injury, not an illness. To me, there’s something very hopeful, very empowering in that kind of viewpoint. It really kind of shifts the paradigm, certainly for someone who’s working to help these individuals. When did that become important for you? Break that down for us a little bit. How have you applied that in your journey or professional career?

Charles: Well, that’s a very good question, Guy. I think it really came about after the second Gulf

War with the invasion of Iraq in 2004. In anticipation of that, I had a number of contacts from Kuwait because I volunteered to assist in Kuwait after the first Gulf War. They wanted me to come back and help them to reinvigorate the research program among those that they studied back in like, 1991, ’92, ‘93. I went to Kuwait. I was there. I interacted with a lot of military, and it became fairly clear to me that the same problems that we had, especially during the Vietnam War, were going to be applied here, in that those men and women who had been exposed to trauma and act like they’ve been traumatized, like all of us, will be perceived as mentally

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ill unless we can change the paradigm, just as you had mentioned. When I returned later in 2004, I was linked with a mutual friend to William Nash, who was an MD psychiatrist in the navy who was about ready to retire. When we chatted at a conference that we both attended—again, introduced by a common friend—he convinced me that the things that I wrote about in my first book on stress disorders among Vietnam veterans was true. It also is true that men and women in the military who are labeled as having post­traumatic stress disorder will be negatively impacted simply by the diagnosis because of the embarrassment and shame that’s experienced by men and women in uniform because they don’t want to be perceived as weak. They don’t want to be perceived as not being able to be trusted. The notion of the importance of a paradigm shift became very obvious to me. I did not want to experience another generation or cohort of veterans having to deal with that embarrassment and shame. We had to suggest that this was a natural and normal consequence of war and that they’re comparing themselves with civilians, which is inappropriate. They need to compare themselves with other men and women who have gone through similar experiences. When we do that, we recognize that there is, before any kind of illness, there is an injury, that there is a traumatic incident that took place, and that whenever there is an injury, there is a window of opportunity to intervene, to enable the person, to muster their resilience, and fight back, if you want to call it that, but essentially face these new symptoms, recognize what the roots are, and then organize their own resources and get assistance from other people. Not mental health, necessarily, assistance, but stress management assistance, being able to occupy their mind, the ability to compartmentalize. All of those things are associated with adapting, adjusting to a traumatic injury or a traumatic event rather than “Am I or am I not ill?”

Guy: Yeah, I love this because to me, again, it’s at the center of shifting not only how we as therapists approach the work we do, but how the individual we’re working with approaches their healing and, of course,

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how society views that, which again brings up the whole question of stigma. Of course, nowadays with combat veterans of all kinds, the stigma is huge. Let’s move on. This is awesome. This podcast, really, is about highlighting your journey. People enter into this specialization of trauma for a lot of different reasons. For me, as I’ve spoken about, my brother came back from the special forces with PTSD, and I just screwed it up. I was so excited to talk to him and was encouraging him and really pestering him to share with me his experiences, but he just didn’t want to do it, couldn’t do it. I was really screwing it up, and I now want to come back and really make a difference. Tell us—and I know you kind of started going there in the beginning—but break it down for us, Charles. What led you into this specialization?

Charles: Research. I never was interested in being a therapist. Not so much because I didn’t like the role or the impact it has on individuals, but I’ve just been a nerd. I mean, I’ve always, math, I just love studying. It was 1971. I was a master’s student at Penn State University. I had a fellowship when I was finished. There was a job waiting for me at Bowling Green State University, but there was, in April of 1971, there was a demonstration—I think I mentioned it earlier—Vietnam Veterans Against the War. It’s called Dewey Canyon III. I started interacting. I went there for political reasons, to make a statement. It was really hard for me because I come from a family where that’s the tradition—going into the military. It was a hard decision to make, but once I made connections with all these, mostly, guys, I knew I was in the right place. We had very similar kinds of attitudes about this, not wanting anymore young males, in particular, killed, particularly males of color. It was at that time that I hadn’t really faced the reality that my experience was quite different than many of the guys that were there. Then I talked to them up into the wee hours of the night as we waited, potentially, to be carted off by the police, because they were pretty much the same age as I was. I noticed that there were just so many problems, just like you were talking about with your brother, and I just listened. There was no Institutional Review Board in

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those days, back in ’71. I was a master’s student working on my thesis, but I took time out. I discovered fairly quickly that I was awful at demonstrating. I mean, I just did everything wrong, probably, and didn’t want to be arrested, but I then made a commitment to myself that I would study this cohort, this group of men, and try to understand why some were just doing fine and were resilient like I was and others that were not, that just serial monogamy, violence, arrests, drugs, abuse, etc. It became fairly clear to me that this was a huge area that needed to be studied. No one else was doing it. I discovered that there were others, so I started the Consortium on Veteran Studies just to get us all on the same page. We ended up making presentations at the American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological, American Sociological, all of the organizations that we believed had colleagues who may want to shift their attention and research agenda to focusing on this. I’ll tell you, the thing where I think I screwed up the most early on was being rather hardheaded. I helped in developing the diagnosis of post­traumatic stress disorder and published as much as anybody in the first five, 10 years after 1980. When it was published by the American Psychiatric Association, I spoke up against men and women who were diagnosed as having post­traumatic stress disorder directly due to their military service. I believe that if you— and I still do, frankly—if you say to a person, “Look, we can’t treat you for this war­related injury, but we’re going to give you money every month for the rest of your life to make up for it, hoping that you will be able to have a good life, theoretically or potentially because you can’t work because of this disorder,” I felt that there were a lot of us in a fog the first five or six years after getting out of the military. That fog should not be translated into a mental disorder. I felt that if these kids—I was a kid then, too—were going to go through all the effort of seeking a total and permanent 100 percent disability for PTSD, they will never get better because there’s built in compensation. It’s built in to reinforce that particular status. Rather, what I felt like, is that they would be guaranteed for the rest of their life the best possible mental health care, because all of

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us need that anyway, but I lost. I look back on it and feel that conceptually and based on science that was the right thing to do, but I didn’t really recognize the other consequences, and that is that poor people were the ones who mostly ended up going in the military that could not get out of it, in effect. Those poor people end up, because they were in the military, having these kinds of issues. It’s hard to find jobs. In effect, the disability program for post­traumatic stress disorder wasn’t just limited to supporting you because you couldn’t work as a result of a mental disorder. It was essentially saying, “Look, we understand the economy sucked at that time, and this is a way for your government to show you we appreciate you raised your right hand at allegiance to the U.S. and joined the military, and this is the least we can do to give you a head start.” I didn’t really think of it that way. I only thought of the potential of it developing a cohort of veterans that are dependent upon disability payments and that we should be spending every waking minute trying to figure out how to prevent as well as treat PTSD, especially related to military service. It’s a long answer, sorry.

Guy: Wow. You know, Charles, what I love about talking to you is you are just, and you have been, on a mission. It’s so clearly coming through in your voice. I mean, from early on when you were in Da Nang and you were talking about those kids, even now when you’re talking about— obviously this happened in the past—recognizing that individuals were coming back, and there was a difference between how they responded and how you responded. There is this sense of help, there’s a sense of reaching others. There’s a sense of wanting to empower others in you that’s coming out that I’m hearing and I’m sure our listeners are hearing. Where did that come from?

Charles: I guess growing up poor, that would be one. Being on The Mall in 1971 woke me up. I have always been a hard charger. That’s why I volunteered to be in the Marine Corps. My uncle, Charles Figley, was in the Marine Corps, so that was something I wanted to do. I had no idea that

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that experience would, not necessarily chance me, but it bonded me with the guys that I served with. I know everyone knows about Band of Brothers, but it clearly is a presence. When I ended up leaving the military, I didn’t want anything to do with any war or the Marine Corps or anything else. Then, when I was reunited with these strangers on The Mall in Washington D.C. in April of 1971, I recognized how goddamn lucky I am. It wasn’t just surviving and not being killed. It was the notion of how I have such a great family, and I had such a wonderful head start in life, not because my family could afford to send me to college. They could not. I went into the Marine Corps because of that, but I was connected to a whole generation of men, and then later women in terms of focusing on them as well. I just felt how lucky I am. I’m not that religious, but it was almost as if I was selected. The longer I went in working with this area and talking to people, the more I felt comfortable. Back in the olden days, there was a perception that war veterans were dangerous. There were good reasons to conclude that because of the publicity it was getting. In those days, there were those who were for the war in Vietnam and those who were against the war. Those who were for the war, of course, denigrated and put down on any of us who were against the war, including they put down people who were having mental issues as a result of their combat experience. My mission emerged when I realized that Vietnam veterans were caught in a political vice against those who hated the war and hated them because they participated in the war, the doves, and then the hawks loved the war but hated the veterans because they, in effect, “lost the war.” It was a notion of who the hell else is going to step up and do something about this? I certainly didn’t want to work in the government or with the VA, nothing against the VA, but I know it would be hamstrung. The best thing to do would be in the academy, in the university, so I could scream my head off about these things and not let people get away with it. That’s what I’ve done. It was really the realization that for the grace of God go I and knowing that no one else was doing this. I think that’s what drove me a good part of my life. In 1980, frankly, I gave up. After I helped with Kuwait and I was

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helping start service programs for these first Gulf War veterans, I felt, “Ok, that’s it. I’ve done it again. I helped another group of veterans.” I didn’t want to do this anymore. I expanded and applied what I’ve learned from that to therapists, meaning it was 1995 that I

published the book “Compassion Fatigue.” Essentially it’s the notion of if you’ve worked with traumatized people, why the hell aren’t you having challenges? If you have empathy and kindness, and you’re caring, you’re going to pick up, through empathy, all of the sadness and the pressures and fears of your patients and clients through your work. It was at that time, probably in the early ‘90s that I began to shift to expanding and applying what I have learned and what a lot of us have learned with combat veterans to other groups of people who have been experiencing this.

Guy: So, who the hell is going to step up and do something about this? That is just the—I mean, you can hear that in your voice—it just sounds so resonant. It’s just amazing. Let’s move on here. We talked a little bit about your journey, what led you to the specialization of this field. Now, let’s focus on an early clinical error. Tell us a story about an error you made, a mistake you made. You did mention one already. I don’t know if you want to go back to that one, but that had a significant impact on you, the work you’ve done, what you’ve learned from it.

Charles: There’s a million, actually, early in my career. I think I would count those years that I didn’t even represent myself as a therapist, because I ended up doing that. In East St. Louis, there was a study. We published the quantitative aspects of it in my 1980 book called “Strangers at Home: Vietnam Veterans since the War.” We studied 906 war veterans, and there were interviews, etc. I followed that up. I tried to track down as many of these guys as I possibly could. In those initial interviews, that’s when I made lots of mistakes. It can happen to any beginning psychotherapist, and that is not listening well enough. As a researcher, I knew precisely the area that I was interested in, so when the clients started

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talking about their dog, I know that I gave all kinds of signals—or anything other than what I wanted them to focus on. I gradually started to learn to do that because I looked into the eyes of the interviewee, and I picked up on it and gradually recognized that they needed to go wherever they needed to go in order to get to where they really needed to go. It was the notion of not being patient, of pushing. I discovered the phenomenal strategy of summarizing. The only undergraduate course I taught at my previous university, Florida State University, was in interviewing. I taught them what I learned, basically, the errors that I made, because if you’re able—even if you don’t know what the hell else to do—if you listen carefully to what the person’s saying and summarize briefly and identify a feeling or two associated with that, that automatically will allow them to keep talking, that will enable them to go to the depths and the levels of complexity that they need to go to. I think that was the biggest thing in terms of just the transition from going from being a hardboiled, bottom line­focused research interview to a clinical interviewer in which the client trusts me, recognizes that I’m going to allow them to uncover some things in the past that they may have not wanted to think about and feel safe with me until we go through that experience. That’s toward the end. The last few dozen interviews were far more productive, both with regard to the data, the information that I gathered, and helping them out therapeutically.

Guy: I love that kind of distinction or relationship you make between you going from a hardboiled research to a patient, listening therapist who’s allowing this person to go wherever they need to go. That is just gold.alright, now we get to one of my favorite questions, and I’m really excited to ask you this because it’s just there for you. I can hear it already. You talked about the challenges of this specialization. For me, I believe it’s important that we know why we’re doing something, because that question just really drives us along in our work, who we are, what we do. This is a little different than what got you here in the first place,

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but Charles, what’s your why? Why do you keep doing this? What drives you on?

Charles: I see working with traumatized people as very easy, and it’s extraordinarily worthwhile. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s that I know, unlike a lot of people in this building. I’m in the school of social work downtown in New Orleans. There are a lot of people who work here that don’t know how close we are when we’re working with a traumatized person, how very close we are to a huge breakthrough. You don’t get that with someone who is chronically depressed. You don’t get that with someone who is trying to get over an addiction. You don’t get that with engrained family violence and trying to get a handle over that. You don’t get that working with a perpetrator within the context of the family or the community and trying to change that. For the traumatized person, were it not for the traumatic event, they wouldn’t be acting this way. Yet, the way they act is very much like someone who is mentally ill, in which they have all these symptoms that are connected that are associated with post­traumatic stress disorder. They have the sudden fears. They have the flashbacks. They have the night terrors and a lot of phobias that are very specific to the traumatic event that they were able to survive. Yet, if we’re able to sit there with them and enable them to feel safe and comfortable and enable them to laugh at some of the things they cried about or were fearful of, then everything changes. A long time ago, a brilliant scholar was able to figure this out. That scholar’s name was Joseph Wolpe, and he was able to figure out that people shift and change when they’re able to bring up the traumatic memory and not feel the reactions they typically feel. Well, how in the hell do you do that? Well, one way you do it is to laugh about it. Another way to do it is to have a positive experience with it. For example, people who draw, people who create art and they’re thinking about a traumatic event and trying to capture that in their art. That’s treatment. That is the power of this particular treatment approach. So, I guess what I’m saying is for some traumatized people, because of the work they’ve already done, they’re that close—I’m making half an

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inch between my thumb and my pointed finger—that close to having a major breakthrough. When they do, life opens up for them. They feel like a different person. They see things in a different way. They don’t dread to be remembering certain things because they’re not as apt to be re­traumatized by this. It’s the notion of having the belief that this person is going to get better and that if we’re able to stick with them and enable them to confront and connect with the things that heretofore they’ve been afraid of, then everything changes.

Guy: So, having the belief that they’re going to get better—and again, this kind of references what you were talking about before—speaking about that kind of paradigm shift, in a sense. I also loved what you said about enabling them, sitting down, creating that environment for them, in a sense, to laugh. We’re going to have a positive experience with what they previously cried about. That is huge, powerful. We can, obviously, talk all day about this. This is awesome. A lot of our listeners here are maybe just getting into trauma. There are others with more experience. You’ve been honing your skills for a while. What advice, what suggestion would you have for someone maybe just getting into this field, maybe even scared about doing so? What would you say?

Charles: Well, it’s interesting. When we were talking about why I did what I did, that there’s no one else that can do it, now there’s a lot of people that can do it, in part thanks to you, as a matter of fact, and what you’re doing right now. We now have, in contrast to not that many years ago, two major organizations, depending on your profession. For psychology, we now have Division 56, which is disaster trauma—I’m sorry, trauma psychology. It’s huge because now, all the psychologists, or those who operate as psychologists, can now go to one place once a year, typically in August, and be around 2,000, 3,000 people who have exactly the same—well, not the same perspective, but have the same passion as you do. Many years before that, in 1985, I helped co­found the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. You get about 3,000 to

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4,000 people. If you go to either of those conferences, you will be immediately embraced because they’re all weird like we are. It’s like firefighters in 9/11 running into the building. We tend to run toward people who have trauma experiences rather than trying to avoid them in a supermarket like a lot of traumatized people have talked about. I think that really has a lot to do with it. One of the things that they could do is read books. I could easily say, “Ah, read my books,” one of the 25 or so, but I want to mention two books that I think have very important relevance for populations that we barely talked about. The last one that I published was last year by Oxford University Press. It’s called “First Do No Self Harm,” and the subtitle is “Understanding and Promoting Physician Stress Resilience.” Believe it or not, physicians get stressed, and a lot of them have traumatic experiences. You could easily find the book online for free at a library, so I’m not saying you can find this information unless you buy it. Time and again they talk about what it’s like to be God, frankly, what it’s like to have someone’s life in your hands and how hard that is. The other one is called “Treating Traumatic Stress Injuries in Military Personnel” using eye movement desensitization reprocessing. EMDR has been around for a while now. What my co­author and I have done—Mark Russell, who is a retired psychologist in the navy working with the Marine Corps—it’s a beautiful way, kind of, if you will, painting by numbers, in effect. We break it down, especially if you’re working with military veterans, we give you all the information, all the terminology and lingo and things like that. We’ve structured it in a way that enables the practitioner, if they read the book, and potentially others as well. We have lots and lots of case studies to help them out. There are a wonderful number of workbooks. Routledge has published one recently. I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s basically a workbook for traumatized people. That also is great. There’s another book that, for young people just starting out, it’s very important to be concerned about your self­care. That’s one of the reasons why we wrote the book for physicians. I highly recommend that you consider reading a book that we wrote, actually, for the animal care community. It’s called “Compassion

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Fatigue in the Animal Care Community.” It’s a very, very basic, very how­to deal with all of this sadness around you in working in the animal care community because trauma therapists do that. One last thing in terms of new professionals, every time I do a workshop I ask the people how many years they’ve worked and all that kind of thing. Invariably, what happens is that those of us who specialize in trauma tend to have referrals from our colleagues who don’t want to work with the traumatized. Consequently, what happens is we have a very full workload, and we may even earn quite nice income. The problem is it’s very complicated. All your caseload is composed of traumatized patients and clients, so you have to focus on your self­care. You have to focus on your own vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, secondary trauma, whatever you want to call it, because you’re doing yourself a favor. The whole phrase, when you get on a place, “Put the mask on yourself first before helping others,” we have to keep that in mind because we’re working in a very difficult and challenging area. We may find it to be relatively easy, but it’s not really easy. We have to be mindful and constantly vigilant about our own care.

Guy: So, those books are going to be available on the show notes page at thetraumatherapistproject.com . Hit on the podcast tab, and Charles’ books will come right up. So, advice, self­care, I love that. First do no self harm. That’s awesome, and then the other books sound really, really interesting to me as well, compassion fatigue for the animal community, wow. Charles, I want to interview you every day. There’s just so much passion, and I love this sense of purpose. It just really is resonating with me, and I’m sure it’s got to be resonating with our listeners. What’s the best way for our listeners to get in touch with you if they want to or need to?

Charles: Just go to charlesfigley.com because it has not only my phone number and my email, it has my Twitter and LinkedIn. If you want to be connected to me and be my colleague, that’s great. I accept nearly everyone’s invitations. One thing I would like to offer your listeners,

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we’re developing a free course on trauma. Very free, it’s called Massive Open Online Course. It’s one of those types of courses. It’s going to be released October 6, and we’re going to give updates on the charlesfigley.com . My hope is that your listeners might be interested in taking that course. I

published a couple of years ago, The Encyclopedia of Trauma, so what we did was we took the best entries from that and then made them into, like, mini­courses. When you take the course, you have a lot of choices of what you wish to study, and you still get a certification for taking the class. It’s part of my mission. It’s what you picked up on.

Guy: Awesome. We’ll have a link to that as well on the website. Charles, I want to thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. It’s been an honor, and really, again, I appreciate you taking the time to do this.

Charles: Thanks so much, Guy, and thank you for doing what you’re doing. You probably don’t get a lot of expressions of appreciation. We just sort of use you up and not say anything. You’ve done a heck of a job for the world. Thank you.

Guy: I appreciate it. Take care.

8. Kathy Platoni.

Guy:alright, Kathy, obviously that’s you in a nut shell. Share with our listeners where you’re calling from now and what it’s like there, for example. Then, let’s get going here.

Kathy: Well, I’m calling from my office in Centerville, Ohio. It is rainy and cold today. It’s not a summer day, so I’m assuming you have much better weather in California.

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Guy: We do. Well, yeah. Right now it’s a little cloudy, but I’m sure it’s going to burn off. We’re expecting a pretty warm day here in Oakland. Again, I’m really excited to have you on here. So many people have recommended that I do get you on here. Let’s start out here, Kathy. I know that you’ve got a lot to share, but what we do here is ask you to share with our listeners something, a quote, a mantra, a phrase, whatever, that kind of served to inspire you in your journey. That could be professional, personal, or both.

Kathy: Well, there are two things that serve as guides for me. One is that trauma is so very unforgettable. It hangs around over your shoulder for the duration, and I think so many people have the expectation that they’re going to completely heal from trauma. Yes, people do heal from trauma, but once you’ve been through an experience that’s so catastrophic that it overwhelms the senses, it tends to hang around for a very long time, and so much more the reason for people to obtain treatment so that they can put one foot in front of the other and continue on their life journey and heal and recover along the way. The other mantra that I carry with me is something that I was taught by my mentor, who was one of the top leading experts in the world on trauma. His quote was that you must put your oxygen mask on first. You must take care of yourself so that you can take care of others, so that you can walk the walk without giving everything of yourself away. That comes from a position of needing to be strong. We’ve all heard that on airplanes. Put your oxygen mask on first so that you can help others. That applies to dealing with trauma as well.

Guy: I’m going to ask you to choose one of those and pick out when that became resonant for you.

Kathy: I think probably the first quote, having been traumatized multiple times in the combat zone. Yes, psychologists are in combat. There is no frontline. Everywhere is the frontline. Also, dealing with the aftermath of the Fort Hood Massacre, I realized that in order to be able to treat patients

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in my practice and work with veterans and work with my fellow soldiers, that I had to deal with my own issues. So, I got into treatment, and several of my friends who were there at the Fort Hood Massacre were the ones that guided me to do that. That’s been a godsend in my life. I do receive treatment at the vet center here in Dayton, Ohio, and that has enabled me to be able to truly appreciate the impact of trauma on my life to be able to manage my own triggers for symptoms of PTSD and to work that into the fabric of what I do with my own patients, whether they be veterans, people who have survived traumatic injuries on the job or on our highways and byways, soldiers who have been traumatized multiple times in the combat zone, as well as law enforcement. I do a lot of work with police officers who have been traumatized, shot in the line of duty, and so on. So, that has held me to a higher standard of truthfulness and allowed me to work more effectively in my own practice.

Guy: You know, we hear so frequently about the difficulty for veterans to get into care, to seek care because of the stigma. For yourself, as a psychologist, I was thinking to myself, “Well, maybe it was easier.” But was it easier?

Kathy: No, it wasn’t because everybody turns to me, in this community, for the voice of veterans. At first I was shocked that I, too, was carrying this burden. Then I realized what a gift it was to be able to share with my patients that unless you confront your burdens head on, you will not be effective at life or in your job, whatever your job is. So, I turned it into something far more positive, and I celebrate the fact that I’ve been able to begin to heal through my own therapy. So, the stigma went away very quickly, and you know what? You’ve got to be true to thine own self.

Guy: Well, thank you for sharing that. I mean, that takes certainly a lot of courage and a lot of guts. Let’s kind of shift here. People get into this field, Kathy, obviously for a lot of different reasons. I’ve often shared part of my journey, which was my brother, who came back from the

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Special Forces, from all over with PTSD when he came back. I didn’t know he had it, and I just was so excited to ask him and talk to him about what he had done, what were his adventures. I bugged him, and he wasn’t talking. I didn’t know what was going on, and I just pestered him, and I blew it. That’s been an inspiration for me to kind of come back and help and share and do things differently. Share with our listeners how you got into this field and trauma, specifically. Why that specific field?

Kathy: Well, that, too, has been an interesting journey. I was a college student. I was on the Vietnam War protest lines back in the ‘70s. So, being in the military was about the farthest thing from my mind, but when I was applying for doctoral programs, I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to afford the tuition. So, the dean of the professional school that I attended suggested that I take a look at army scholarships, and son of a gun, I received one in 1979. So, that paid for the entirety of my doctoral studies. I owed the army four years. I gave them five. I came off active duty in 1987, and after two weeks realized I made a huge mistake. I wasn’t ready to leave the army and that it had a huge place in my heart and my mind. So, I joined the Reserves, and everybody thinks two weeks in the summer and two days a month. Well, that’s not the way it is. There’s a cartoon that goes along with that, but I’ll spare the readers the profanity that goes with it. Remaining in the Reserves, I knew that at some point the balloon was going to go up. I was deployed four times, three to the combat theater, and as a psychologist in the military you better know what you’re doing in the field of trauma and have a deep and true understanding. I received a tremendous amount of training through our local critical incident stress management team, which I translated to being a psychologist in several different combat stress units. Over the course of my deployments, you’re exposed to so many soldiers who deal with horrific images and experiences and sights and sounds of trauma. You really have to learn the field and out. Of course, after the Fort Hood Massacre realizing that victims of trauma were not getting the services

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that they needed made me an ardent advocate for everybody who needs trauma therapy to receive it. So, that’s my journey in a nutshell.

Guy: So, yeah, that was definitely in a nutshell. So, you’re in grad school. You get into the Reserves to get your education paid for. You get into the army. Even having been protesting, how did you make that shift, that kind of moral shift, in a sense?

Kathy: Yes, it was a moral shift. Well, I realized at some point during my college years that it wasn’t the soldiers and other military personnel that I was protesting against. It was my belief in the wrongfulness of the war, but you know what? I was uneducated. So, I educated myself. I got the full immersion when I joined the Reserves and realized how ignorant I had been. I had been sold the bill of goods by what I’d been told and what I’d been educated about. So, I re­educated myself. It was a huge transformation. From early on in the game I realized how much of a connection I had with the camaraderie and the esprit de corps that comes with wearing the uniform. It’s something that I love to this day, and I’m still in and still wearing the uniform for the Ohio Military Reserve.

Guy: You know, you talk about the importance of really knowing what you’re doing, I mean, knowing trauma­informed treatment inside and out. I’m just curious about that. For obvious reasons, right, but you highlighted that. You kind of put a highlighter around that. Talk to us about that.

Kathy: Well, in order to be able to truly understand what military personnel go through in the combat theater, you really have to baptize yourself in that body of water to put yourself in their boots and appreciate at the deepest levels what it is to see your comrades die by horrific means, to see them burn to death, to see them suffer the loss of their brothers and sisters. It really is a total immersion approach. When you’re in the combat theater, you, too, will have that experience. You can’t cut yourself off from understanding that that is going to impact anybody exposed to that

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at levels you never thought you could expose yourself to. So, it’s an amazing experience to be in that vat of human suffering.

Guy: I’m really curious, Kathy, about some early mistakes you made while you were kind of cutting your teeth on this whole process, in a sense. Share with our listeners a story, if you will, and what you learned from that as you were becoming accustomed and learning this whole process inside and out.

Kathy: I think one of the most powerful lessons I learned was in Afghanistan. Many of the soldiers that we dealt with and marines and Air Force personnel had had multiple deployments. We know that’s an issue. Many of them were still functioning in the war time theater quite well, but with therapy to help guide them through keeping their own symptoms somewhat at bay in order to be able to put one boot in front of the other. I realized early on in the game that you cannot unzip them completely because they have to be mission capable. You can provide support. You can provide any number of coping skills, but you cannot completely allow them to unload at the deepest levels. That’s something that is hard to put into words. You have to gauge them on a case­to­case basis, but in order to allow them to continue to function in the war time theater, you have to almost help them subconsciously bury some of the memories and images that they carry with them. Boy, was that ever a wakeup call for me.

Guy: Keep going. That’s a cliffhanger right there. I want you to share something with our listeners because this is really, really beneficial here.

Kathy: I think that allowing them to talk about the horrific things they experienced, particularly the losses of their fellow soldiers and the catastrophic means in which people die or are maimed in the war time theater. I have to give them permission to repress that because those images would often stop them dead in their tracks and not allow them to focus on keeping themselves and their fellow service members safe. It really is giving them permission to say, “I can’t think about this. I’m

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going to compartmentalize it.” That’s an important term, compartmentalization, to keep the things that are most troublesome and most horrific in a box somewhere in your head. That’s a fine art form to learn, but I had to learn it myself as well, particularly with respect to the Fort Hood Massacre. Teaching them to do that was one of the most powerful interventions that I was able to give them. There’s a second piece to that. I would give them lists of places that they could go when they returned to the continental United States. Do not leave this hanging. Do not leave these burdens unresolved. Whether that be the vet center or a particular military installation that they were returning to, if they were active duty personnel, whether it was National Guard units or Reserve units, I gave them a long list of places to make sure that their treatment did not stop when they got on that plane, the C­130 or the C­17 Globemaster, to return home to the United States.

Guy: Was there an instance where you didn’t compartmentalize or encourage them to compartmentalize and that had adverse consequences?

Kathy: Yes, oftentimes there’s a necessity to medevac them, or med evacuate them back to the States when they’re not functioning, when their symptoms are so overwhelming that they literally put themselves at risk, whether that be in a guard tower or the gun turret of a Humvee or in the back of an MRAP, mine resistant ambush protected vehicles, those 38,000­pound vehicles that are used on the combat theater. When you medevac someone back, they deal with a level of survivor guilt that’s immeasurable because in their minds they’ve abandoned their comrades. Another issue in the combat theater is overmedication. In more recent years there’s a full cabinet of mood altering medications in the battalion aid stations and combat support hospitals and so on. That’s not always the answer because the side effects often prevent soldiers and other military personnel from being mission capable. So, early on you really have to hone your skills to make sure that you’re not putting people in a position

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where they’re so over­medicated you have to send them back to the States or they’re so overcome by symptoms that they have to be sent back because they’re going to have another burden to carry.

Guy: How do you manage the stigma when you’re talking to someone? I’m imagining that sometimes your very presence or a psychologist’s very presence kind of denotes a stigma. In other words, if someone’s talking to a psychologist, are they scared to talk to a psychologist?

Kathy: Oh, absolutely. There’s a way that we go about this in the combat theater. It’s basically an embedding procedure. You embed yourself with combat arms units so you become one of them. You offer to do presentations about sleep disturbances, combat stress, any number of topics so they get familiar with you. You have to be so open and engaging with them that they’re less afraid to come to you, other than by a referral process by the command or a medical professional or paraprofessional. You go on missions with them. Going outside the wire to prove that you’re one of them and you’re not scared to go out with them and you would put your life at risk for them is the best way to win the hearts and minds of your fellow military personnel. I went outside the wire every change I got. Something else I did, being that I’m a full bird colonel, I took my rank off so we’re all equal. I had them call me by my first name if they felt comfortable doing that. You become one with them. That opens up doors like nothing else.

Guy: As you’re talking I just realized that we haven’t even brought up the topic or the subject that you’re a woman. I’m just kind of marveling at that, and yet, it’s got to come into play.

Kathy: It does come into play. A lot of soldiers think, “First of all, you’re a mental health professional. What do you know about combat? Second thing is you’re a woman. What do you know about combat?” So, you’ve really got to prove yourself. We all carry weapons, so if you’re not afraid to be carrying your weapon or to be firing a weapon, you’re not afraid to

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fill sandbags going into the chow hall. There’s always a sign outside the chow hall, “You must fill so many sandbags before you come in for chow.” So, you take your rank off and you fill sandbags and you get your hands dirty like anybody else. So, over time they begin to trust you when they see that you’re just one of the guys.

Guy: Wow, wow. That’s amazing. Your story is amazing. Where are you from, originally?

Kathy: I’m originally from Yorktown Heights, New York. Hudson River Valley, upstate New York.

Guy: I was sensing east coast. I’m from New York as well.

Kathy: I kind of picked that up.

Guy: So, you know, Kathy, one of my favorite questions here is why we’re doing this. Why we’re doing anything, but why we’re doing this. The answer to that I just feel inspires us, keeps us going. Why do you keep doing this on a day­to­day basis? What’s driving you?

Kathy: You know, once you’ve worn that uniform, it transcends everything else. To do something for the greater good, to be a part of something so much larger than yourself is what drives me. Even though I’m retired from the Army Reserves, to be able to serve in uniform in a different capacity and to open my doors to everybody who’s ever worn the uniform, to put my name out there and say, “Hey, I’m here to help. Call me. Email me. Come into my office.” I get such a spark from that. It just drives me. I’m also excited about the prospect—and I know this probably sounds really bizarre—of being recalled. God forbid there is a national call up again, I would put that other uniform on again anytime, anywhere because I love what that represents. Once you’re a warrior, you’re always a warrior.

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Guy: Wow, that’s really inspiring. You speak with such passion and enthusiasm. Are you doing something different than other psychologists? I mean, are you the norm out there?

Kathy: On many levels, no.

Guy: What are you doing, do you feel, that enables you to do the work you do?

Kathy: Well, I’m probably the only mental health professional, one of maybe just a few mental health professionals in this entire community of southwest Ohio that has deployed and has experienced combat, certainly the only one that’s been exposed to a massacre such as the Fort Hood Massacre. So, that’s kind of set me apart. Not that I do things better than anybody else. I’ve just had different experiences than so many of my colleagues. So, having been exposed to so much trauma myself, that really makes you a bit different. Also, like some of my colleagues in this area, I use a form of technology that is known nationwide and has been out there for almost 35 years, and that is Alpha­Stim technology. I’ve been teaching my fellow colleagues how to use this. It is the gold standard of how to treat PTSD. Alpha­Stim technology is something that’s been, again, out on the market for 35 years. It was created by Dr. Dan Kirsch. You use a small device. It’s called the Alpha­Stim AID, which means anxiety, insomnia, and depression, and it is FDA­approved for treatment. Those disorders as well as trauma­related disorders, PTSD and acute stress disorder, big trauma­related disorders. What it does is it produces alpha waves in the brain. Alpha waves are associated with deep calm, deep relaxation, increased mental focus, and increased mental alertness. With PTSD, there are so many disquieting symptoms that sufferers carry with them. The Alpha­Stim allows them to quiet those symptoms and to exist in a place where the world is not quite as threatening. There is a cumulative response so that the more you use this device, the lesser your symptoms that are so troublesome, particularly anxiety and sleep disturbances because nobody sleeps well who’s been to the combat

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theater. Over time you see people being able to sleep without the benefit of as much Ambien or Trazodone or whatever else is prescribed, not that these are bad, but over time people build up a tolerance. They become addicted to benzodiazepines so you need more frequent and larger dosages. This device can’t hurt you. It can only make things better. It is available through the formulary in every VA in this country, and

almost every army medical center and many Air Force medical centers have these devices on hand. It’s difficult to wade through the system, but they are available.

Guy: I’ll have that linked up at the show notes page at thetraumatherapistproject.com with everything Kathy’s talking about here. That’s Alpha­Stim technology. So, we’ve talked about a lot. You shared a lot of great insights already, but let’s kind of hone it down, if we could, to people just getting into this field, people just beginning their trauma­informed treatment. What advice would you give them, Kathy, with regards to not only working in the field of trauma, but more specifically with veterans?

Kathy: Here it is: One size does not fit all. That’s something that I also learned. There are many different approaches to dealing with trauma. The evidence­based practices such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, prolonged exposure therapy, cognitive processing therapy are all very powerful interventions, but they don’t work for everyone. It is so important to be open to alternative approaches such as Alpha­Stim technology. Don’t let me forget to give you the website for that. Canine­assisted therapy, equine­assisted therapy, hypnotherapy, supportive and insight­oriented psychotherapy, so you must be open to looking at other evidence­based practices so that you can tailor to the individual and not what somebody says you should use because you’re in the system.

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Guy: That’s just a blanket overall statement. I think that’s obviously very sage advice. What about working with veterans? Obviously there are people out there who haven’t, who want to, who will. What’s your recommendation as far as that goes?

Kathy: Well, if it’s at all possible to do a practicum, to do an internship at the VA or an army or Air Force medical center or naval medical center, avail yourself to the many different organizations that do training in trauma. Get some good, solid training. PESI is one of the training bodies that does a very good job at training in trauma. J & K seminars are also absolutely outstanding. Do one of their online courses. Buy the books. Attend these seminars. Get your feet as wet as you can with any number of credentialed organizations that do training in trauma. If at all possible during the course of your education, either getting a master’s in social work or a master’s as a licensed professional counselor or a doctorate in psychology, get yourself into a track that allows you to be exposed to some really solid trauma training.

Guy: So, J & K seminars, which I’ve never heard of. I’ll link that up in the show notes page.

Kathy: Yes, Ken and Judi Ralph run J & K seminars. In fact, I did a two­day workshop with them back in 2007 or 2008, so our materials are on their website and can be purchased.

Guy: Ok, now what two books would you share with our listeners that have kind of inspired you along your path? Again, this could be professionally or personally.

Kathy: Well, of course I’m going to talk about our two books. Dr. Scurfield and I edited and wrote two books with about 50 different experts in the field. Our first book—this is not Dr. Scurfield’s first book—“War Trauma and Its Wake: Expanding the Circle of Healing” and our second book— we just talked about alternative approaches—is called

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“Healing War Trauma: A Handbook of Creative Approaches.” We’ve got numerous different ways to provide excellent treatment to veterans and to active duty military personnel. There are so many excellent books out there: “Redeployment” by Phil Klay. I cannot remember the exact title of the book by Edward Tick. Do a search of PTSD books, and probably every one out there has tremendous merit. “When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home” by Dr. Paula Caplan, “Quixote in Ramadi” by my former NCOIC and dear, dear friend Michelle Wilmot, also excellent, excellent book. “The Desert Warrior,” also by Michelle Wilmot will be coming out sometime, I believe, this year. So, do a search. Look at Lily Casura’s website. Her website is www.healingcombattrauma.com , and she has an excellent bibliography on her website.

Guy: Yeah, she’s awesome. I’ve been in contact with her, and Ed Tick I’ve had on the podcast here. He was pretty amazing. So, your books—and again, I’m going to have these linked up at the show notes page—“War Trauma and Its Wake: Expanding the Circle of Healing” and, secondly, “Healing War Trauma: A Handbook of Creative Approaches,” psychosocial stress series. So, Kathy, what’s the best way for people to contact you?

Kathy: Well, probably through my email address. You’re going to laugh. I’m four­foot­11. I weigh about 90 pounds soaking wet or dry, and my email address is drrunt@woh.rr.com .

Guy: Ok, I’ll have that up on the show notes page.alright, Kathy, you—and I’m sure this is not the first time that you’ve been called this—but you are definitely a force of inspiration. I love it. I’m so glad you took the time. Yeah, this is why I’m doing this, because I get to talk to people like you. I get inspired by people like you. I learn from people like you. I’m sure our listeners are feeling the same thing well, so I can

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tell you right now, this is not going to be the first time that I’m going to invite you onto this podcast.

Kathy: Well thank you. I’m so honored and inspired by what you do as well.

Guy: I appreciate that. So, Kathy, thank you so much, and have a great Fourth.

Kathy: And you as well, and thanks to all of the veterans and military personnel who are listening. Thank you, Guy, for the healing art that you have brought to the airwaves.

Guy: I appreciate that. Take care.

Kathy: You, too. Thank you.

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