There's something inherent in all of us,
where we just want to deny trauma its existence.
No one wants to go through hell in combat,
come back and then be told that they've got a disorder.
No one wants that.
You can build a box in your mind
and you can jam a whole lot of hurt and pain into that box.
And when they blow open, it's not pretty.
My PTSD is always there, lurking,
like this little thing on my shoulder
that just won't go away.
I drove drunk so many times,
bunch of times, drunk driving,
'cause I didn't give a damn, I didn't care.
I didn't care about nothing or nobody.
I know there's been memory loss issues,
but what really floored me was the long term, like,
I probably don't have a quality of life
if I don't address these issues.
I don't want to go to a home because I have dementia.
I would rather be dead.
So many troops have traveled down that dark pathway
of self-blame and survivor guilt,
come to see that in their minds,
suicide is their best answer.
Your problems aren't going to get better
by just holding it in.
There are people that want to help you.
It's not going to be an easy journey.
But, if I can go seek help, you can go seek help.
Have a seat.
I love your blanket there.
Thank you. When did you join the military?
Yeah, 1997.
Okay, and which branch?
I'm Army.
And, did you have deployments?
18.
Seven trips to Iraq, 10 trips to Afghanistan,
and one trip to Africa.
No generation of veterans in our entire country's history
has ever been exposed to this kind of enduring threat.
The deployments, the traumas, the grief, the loss,
the moral injury.
30 To 40% of veterans who experience the trauma,
including sexual trauma, will develop PTSD.
How about emotions, anxiety, depression, irritability?
I mean, I have my demons for sure.
I don't go to malls, I don't go to big sporting events.
I don't go to, I don't do the crowd thing.
Because you're easily overwhelmed,
too much stimulation?
Yeah. Yeah.
Have you been given a PTSD diagnosis
by the military?
Yeah, I have.
PTSD is real.
This is a human being's natural, normal reaction
to what is an abnormal, life-threatening trauma.
It's a wound, it's an injury, it's a brain disorder.
The person is not able to heal naturally.
And this manifests in a lot of symptoms,
things like having nightmares about the event,
that destroys their sleep.
Or they'll relive the event.
So, kind of involuntary memories of that trauma
will invade their daily life.
And, they could feel hyper-vigilance,
where their body's kind of on hyper alert,
and they can't relax and kind of get back to a baseline.
When we're being triggered, the body, the whole body,
kind of goes into that place, right?
Whether our heart rate starts increasing, right,
our muscles start tensing up or working so hard,
and our breath starts working a lot harder.
I would get crippling anxiety attacks,
like ones that send me to the hospital.
Like, I've been to the emergency room 15, 20 times
thinking I'm dying from anxiety attacks.
Absolutely nothing wrong with me.
Just anxiety attack that bad,
sweats, blood pressure up, heart rate up.
It was so bad, like, I would get dizzy.
When I experienced my traumas,
there was a definite shift for me in my personality.
I'm a little more closed off now than I used to be.
I'm not trusting of people.
I regress back to feeling like things are being done to me
and I have no control over them.
It just sticks with me.
And, as much as I try to get those images out of my mind,
as much as I try to move on
and be okay with all of that,
it's difficult.
Lesser known, but equally devastating,
is like the mood states of PTSD.
So people with PTSD, they can live with shame, anger,
guilt, like these chronic feelings, these negative emotions.
Interpersonal relationships,
the way that those symptoms impact their, you know,
family or you know, their environment.
So, sometimes difficult to keep a job, you know,
difficult to stay in relationship.
People lose touch with their families.
They can feel really cut off from the world.
So they can't experience happiness fully,
they can't experience love fully.
I didn't know what was wrong with me.
I was like, I'm just angry all the time, I'm mad.
I just want to fight everybody. This is not how I used to be
I was the class clown. Why am I acting like this?
I couldn't function. I wasn't able to make good decisions.
I would say, risky behaviors.
I started drinking, started getting into substances.
Got arrested, and then I got arrested again,
and a third time.
And so, of course at that time
I was caught up in the criminal justice system.
About September is when I start feeling different.
I'd rather just go to sleep and not wake up.
I don't want to live anymore.
I miss the old me.
I wish I had that person back.
I was diagnosed with PTSD.
That was kind of life-changing, because it put a label,
I feel like, a label on me that I wasn't really prepared
to address at the time.
There's something really unpalatable about PTSD.
We don't want to think about that.
When we hear people telling us uncomfortable stories,
that makes us uncomfortable.
There's something about trauma that feels infectious,
and it has kind of slipped in and out
of our national consciousness for centuries.
PTSD is as old as war itself.
It's as old as humanity itself.
Here is human salvage.
The final result of all that metal and fire can do
to violate mortal flesh.
This hospital is one of the many for the care and treatment
of the psychoneurotic soldier.
As far back as World War II,
people would be considered shellshocked.
They would comment that they weren't,
had a million-mile stare,
unable to really interact with the world around them
in the context of trauma.
There has been a lot of stigma that has been associated
with seeking out help.
It says here on your record from overseas
that you had headaches and that you had crying spells.
Yes, sir.
Mm-hmm.
A display of emotion is all right.
I'm not doing this deliberately, sir--
Of course you're not. Please believe me.
I, I do believe you.
A display of emotion is sometimes very helpful.
And we have evolved,
and we continue to evolve
after every conflict.
We're doing much better this time around
than has historically happened in the past.
So, I don't know if you're familiar
with what happened after Vietnam,
and the way soldiers were treated when they came home.
I'm ex-Special Forces,
that defines a major part of my life.
As a 18, 19, 20, 20-year-old kid, to see and do
the things that you do, and think that you're not going to,
that you're not going to be changed,
to think that those images aren't going to come back
to haunt you.
I lost people, and I came back and I, you know, we didn't,
like I said, we didn't have a name for it.
We didn't know what was going on, really.
And you just look around, you're,
and number one thing is you're lost.
Especially when, you know, you came back
and everybody hated you.
Nobody comes back unchanged. Nobody.
We've really got so much
to thank the Vietnam veterans for,
because they came back from Vietnam
and talked about what they were experiencing.
And, it's just as scary every time.
And it gets worse.
I had 13 men when I came.
And, it's four days later now
and how many are still here?
Six.
Those veterans just suffered so much,
and have helped us as a nation grow so much,
to separate the war and the politics from the warrior
and his or her service.
When we think of PTSD,
the obvious image that comes to mind
is the soldier back from war,
but many traumas can contribute to PTSD,
you know, beyond combat trauma.
So if you look at sexual trauma, rape,
being robbed at gunpoint,
the reality is, is it didn't become a formal diagnosis
until 1980.
And since 9-11, since events like Hurricane Katrina,
the great tsunami, there has been an explosion
in PTSD science.
I really believe in that notion, you know,
name it so you can tame it, and now we have a name for it.
You know, I had really wished with all my heart
that, you know, maybe my kids wouldn't see war,
but they did.
You know, our family, some families
just seem to fight our wars for us, you know?
And, my family has fought in every war since the,
since the American Revolution.
Feel proud of that?
Yeah, yeah, I do.
In high school, I was a star athlete.
I started community college here, started working,
didn't know where I was, what I wanted to do.
My family has a long line of combat veterans.
Both of my grandfathers served in Korea,
my father in Vietnam.
I remember 9-11, the day, I was at school.
Everybody was very frightened.
I knew at that moment that I wanted to do something
to protect our country.
So, I wanted to join the military.
It was just a strong reaction to what I'd witnessed
that made me want to have some kind of effect on
peace in the world, and a safe home for my family.
I come from a very large family, you know,
I mean, my parents are immigrants.
My father was a roofer, a day laborer.
We didn't have much, but we always had our family,
and we grew up in some pretty bad neighborhoods.
We were homeless for about six months,
living in a U-Haul in a Motel 6 parking lot.
So, we had a Motel 6 room, that was my mom, my dad,
six kids, and a U-Haul.
And we would go back and forth between the U-Haul
and the Motel 6.
Both my parents worked, it just, it was hard back then
as it is now for people to survive.
And there are recruiting offices all up and down
in the neighborhoods I grew up in.
I mean, if you go to any affluent part of the country,
there's no recruiting stations there.
And this is no secret that the Army or the military
recruits from poor and disenfranchised communities,
because they have something to offer.
They give you education, healthcare, housing, food,
a paycheck.
The military will give it to you if you sign your life
on the dotted line.
A lot of soldiers will join the military
sometimes to get away from things,
like child abuse or community violence,
and just challenges in your family life, family structure.
I was a prior foster youth and I was adopted
when I was about three years old.
But, I was always kind of missing family connection,
just didn't know where I belonged in the world.
I knew always since I was little
that I wanted to do something in the helping profession.
So I knew I wanted to help people,
I just didn't know how I wanted to serve others.
I joined the military when I was 20 years old,
and I decided to join the Army to become a medic.
I've always been a very smart student,
and I, for a while I was ashamed of my smarts.
Mentally, I wasn't even prepared to go to college.
So, and the military recruiter comes around your high school
and says, "Hey, we'll give you X amount of dollars.
You'll get a uniform and respect.
You can travel the world, you'll have a career.
Why don't you sign up for this?"
I joined the Army September 2nd, 2005.
October 2nd, 2005, I was gone 30 days later
to basic training.
Bootcamp was interesting.
I was one of three females and 60 males.
It was stressful,
but it made me a really very strong person.
I tried very hard to be the perfect soldier.
That was my agenda.
When Cairey went into the Army,
she was confident and self-assured and strong.
She was so excited about life in the Army
that she was already talking about
the Green to Gold program.
If you go in enlisted, get your college degree,
you can go back in or you can become an officer.
I assumed that those above me knew what they were doing,
and it was my best option was to really just
follow the rules, do what they told you to do
and not ask a lot of questions.
I picked infantry, didn't know what it was,
you know, you think it's like a video game.
So you get there and they, they have to break you down.
You cannot be a civilian anymore,
because a civilian doesn't do certain things
to other civilians.
It's not natural for human beings
to want to kill each other.
It's not natural to run through bullets.
Our drill sergeant would always tell us,
"I need to break you down in order to build you up."
And the training is just, it's basically how to,
how to kill, I was a grunt.
They teach you how to shoot, all the weapons, everything.
That's what a grunt is, a bullet sponge, a door kicker,
a barrel-chested freedom fighter,
whatever you want to call us, that's what we are.
The Iraq war was starting.
I remember President Bush giving a speech.
He said, "This is the call of this generation."
The enemies of freedom in Afghanistan are determined,
no question about it.
I looked at myself in the mirror and realized that
I have something to give to my country.
And I went to my dad and said, "I'm enlisting,"
and I joined the Army.
My dad was a Green Beret and I wanted to go and do that.
Chris and his younger brother, Mitch,
both decided to go in the Army.
And Chris, you know, followed me into special operations.
Hit it.
Two rounds.
I knew that there was a possibility
that I would be in combat.
And as a, you know, 20-year-old kid, it's,
I didn't know really what that meant.
After medic school, I went to,
my first station was Germany,
Landstuhl Regional Medical Center,
and I sort of kind of forgot who I was before.
It was kind of this psychological programming that happened.
I learned really quickly that one mistake,
if I made a mistake, everybody could be impacted.
And so that was a huge, just reminder to me
that I'm no longer about self, now I'm about team
and about unit cohesion.
I think we volunteer because we love what we do.
So we keep going because we love what we do.
We love being Green Berets.
I liked being overseas, you know.
I have a deep love and appreciation for Afghanistan,
you know, and its people.
And to be honest, I like the adrenaline, you know,
like to fly in helicopters and shoot guns out of helicopters
and to chase that high.
I deployed into the infancy of the war.
Afghanistan, I got there in February of 2005.
I was a young officer, military police officer.
So, this is actually the last uniform that I wore.
I wore this at my retirement ceremony in 2013, July 25th,
after 10 years, one month, 25 days of service.
And, I was a major.
I have the Bronze Star,
I had two Meritorious Service Medals, an RCOM, an AAM.
There's a lot of controversy about,
"Look, this is why you wear this on this side
and that on that side."
Like, you wear your name tape on this side
because you are not as important
as the organization as a whole, right?
So the US Army is over the heart. And, I stood by that.
I was like, that's, "Yes, I love that."
So I have the military police crest,
or the regimental association crest.
Assist, protect, defend, that's what MPs do.
We are of the troops and for the troops.
We are a soldier, we're for the soldier.
We have the mission of being law enforcement advisors
throughout the country.
And within a week of being there,
we lost an NCO, a non-commissioned officer,
an amazing leader, a staff sergeant, Shane Koele.
He had just had a baby two months prior.
And it was, it was devastating.
It was devastating.
And we thought,
is this the next 12 to 15 months that we're going to have?
During that time was kind of like a pivotal time
for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,
because there was mass casualties.
And so as a medic, we would go and just
take them straight from the helicopters,
or straight from the medevacs,
and we would stabilize them
and take them to where they needed to go.
So I want to say there was like this underlying compassion
and trauma that all of us kind of collectively experienced,
but maybe didn't have a name for it.
Like we didn't know exactly what we were experiencing,
but there was this underlying trauma
that all of us kind of collectively felt,
in regards to our brothers and sisters coming through
with severe wounds.
My first tour was an absolute culture shock.
I didn't know what I didn't know,
so every day for me was new.
We were supposed to be there 12 months,
but my unit got extended to 15 months,
because we were part of the surge.
I was in a reconnaissance, surveillance,
and target acquisition unit,
so our job was to literally go out and hunt people down,
that was our whole job.
I was in Baghdad, I was in downtown Baghdad,
my first deployment, and it was a nightmare,
it was an absolute night.
I remember seeing dead bodies on the streets, you know,
dogs eating their face.
There was a lot of enemy engagements,
and there was a lot of traumatic things.
There was one particular mission
that has been the source of my PTSD.
We conducted a helicopter assault on the compound
of the high-value target that we were after.
We came up to this apricot orchard, and it was early May,
so the flowers had just bloomed.
It was very beautiful.
As soon as the last guy kind of got into the orchard,
all hell kind of just broke loose.
We got ambushed.
It was an overwhelming amount of enemy fire
that was coming in on us,
and we were all kind of just stuck in that one little spot.
It was a horrible spot to be in.
I was down on my stomach,
just trying to stay out of the line of fire,
and I remember seeing these, the tree,
these nicks just kind of form in the tree trunk.
And I realized it was the bullets hitting that tree,
literally like inches away from me.
An Afghan commander was shot to my left
and another one was shot to my right.
It's hard to describe the feeling of
thinking that you're going to die.
Second deployment was just as bad.
I mean, we were in northern Iraq my second deployment,
in a very vast region that we had to pacify.
And, I already had a bad feeling about this.
And I'm a gunner, so I'm up in the top of the turret,
the very last vehicle in the convoy.
And, out of the corner of my eye,
the left corner of my eye, movement catches my eye.
So I look to my left and there's a kid, two kids,
and they have what's called a RKG 3 grenade.
It's this big-ass Russian grenade.
The grenade hit the side of my turret,
bounced up, and then hit the back, and then boom, blew up,
and knocked me down.
I was like, wow. Blew out my ear drum.
If it had hit me straight,
I would not be here talking to you.
So I told my medic in the truck, I was like,
"Doc, man, my head hurts so bad, I'm so tired."
He's like, "Do not go to sleep."
He would not let me, he's like, "Don't go to sleep,
you got to stay awake."
I was like, "Why?"
He's like, "Bro, you could have bleeding on the brain.
If you go to sleep, you might not wake up."
I was like, "Dude, we got four more hours of patrol."
He's like, "I know, but you can't go to sleep.
You got to stay awake."
I remember taking a breath, stop, when I reloaded my gun,
to just say a prayer.
Through the scope of my rifle, I could see them
and see the enemy moving them, firing at us.
They took small children as human shields
and they were moving them from house to house.
So we, I was stuck with the decision to return fire,
or don't, and get killed.
It was a horrible, horrible situation to be in.
We dropped three bombs and killed the fighters
that were shooting at us.
Unfortunately, you know, there was civilian casualties.
We have to conduct battle damage assessment.
So we have to go and document everything.
A thousand-pound bombs do a lot of damage.
You don't, you don't see bodies,
you know, you see body parts.
I hadn't been there even a year
and I was sexually assaulted.
That night, we had gone out with a few friends
and he was our sober driver.
He was a non-commissioned officer.
He took us to the bar and then took us home.
During the timeframe around that,
he had slipped a card into my door.
So I didn't realize that my door wasn't locked.
My first duty station was in Korea.
We did a lot of drinking in Korea,
that was kind of what we did, definitely the lower enlisted.
And I'd had a night of drinking
and made it back to my barracks,
and woke up one morning with somebody on top of me,
and that was one of my comrades.
He had pushed open the door while I was sleeping,
and just, I woke up with him on top of me.
I told him that he needed to go back to his room.
He pushed me really hard and I hit my back of my head
against my headboard.
And then I just, I lost consciousness.
And I remember waking up and just thinking like, what just,
what just happened?
My head was hurting really bad and there was blood
in the back of my head, and I ended up taking a shower
and trying to just wash away what just happened.
So we get back to the base and I go to the aid station
and the doctor, he gave me these things
to try to reduce the swelling and inflammation
that was going on, because I was feeling so much pressure
in my brain.
I told my higher ups and they told me
that I shouldn't pursue any charges
because my career would be over.
So, I didn't do anything about it and he got away with it.
I really tried not to think about it at all,
that was my way of getting over it.
And that's what they told me I should do,
is just get over it.
When I went to my next duty station, I tried to start new.
That was what was great about changing from one station
to another, is you could kind of start brand new, start fresh.
I tried to be really close friends with the females,
so that we would have this kind of protective barrier
around us.
And so I came off, I think, as a strong female type,
so that nobody would pick on me.
What didn't work was that I was a target.
I was gang raped, while in a semi-comatose state.
I was drugged, but I could feel people doing things to me.
And that wound up being three of my comrades
that I'd known for over a year.
You feel like the enemy is on the other side of the wire,
that that's the person you have to look out for,
to be protected from, to be on guard with.
You never think it's going to be the person you've known
two years, that on one level was willing to die for you,
to protect you, just as you would them,
but on the other end,
take advantage of you in that kind of way.
When Chris came home from his first tour
in Afghanistan, you know, we went up on the mountain,
and spent some time, and I told him straight up, I said,
"You know, those faces are never going to go away.
The best you can hope is to get along with them."
I was okay with killing guys that were trying to kill me.
But when you see the pain and suffering
of innocent children,
it just sticks with me.
Why am I so lucky, and they're not?
It's guilt. It's guilt.
So after my second combat tour,
I knew that I couldn't go back in the state that I was in.
And so I made the difficult decision to not reenlist,
and come home.
They gave me what they call a dead man's profile.
Can't carry a gun, can't wear body armor,
can't wear a helmet, can't do PT, can't do anything.
And that was the start of my journey
to them looking at all my medical records,
and retiring me out of the Army a hundred percent disabled.
I'll never forget, I left the military October 1st, 2013.
There was no fanfare, there was no pomp and circumstance,
there was none of that.
He signed me out of my room,
I gave him back the room key, and he's like,
"All right, brother, good luck."
And that was it.
And I just drove out the gates of Fort Campbell,
and I was like, "What do I do now?"
And I just then, I had to start to learn how to live life.
I can feel your reflexes,
rather than beating you with a hammer.
Oh, yeah?
Okay.
That looks good, except you made touch contact, for balance?
Yeah. Okay.
I started to kind of feel uneasy.
Feel, okay.
Kuma, up.
Come here, Kuma, up.
Kuma, up. Come on, up.
Kuma up, up.
Good boy.
So, let's look at your MRI DTI.
Okay. Yeah, let's. I'm super interested in this.
Okay. So, looking at this first.
Okay, this is the left hemisphere of your brain.
And, this is the cerebellum.
PTS is a brain condition.
It's a brain condition that impacts
our entire mind-body system.
What we view it as is an injury to the mind.
There are three main key areas of the brain
that process stress.
The amygdala, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex.
The amygdala is kind of like the emotional computer,
or like the alarm system.
The hippocampus is responsible for processing memory
and some memory storage.
And the prefrontal cortex helps mitigate emotional response,
or fear response, and impulse control.
It's our little alarm system.
You know, we have two amygdalae,
that are just little smoke detectors,
and they're always on the prowl,
looking for something that's new, novel,
a threat in the environment, hostility.
When one is exposed to too much trauma, stress, or distress,
either at one time, or over a period of time,
or all mixed up together,
that our alarm system can get dysregulated.
We know that people with PTSD,
they have an overactive amygdala.
And the amygdala is the part of our brain
that kind of deals with fight or flight,
and deals with emotions like anger and fear.
And essentially in the PTSD brain,
the amygdala is overactive.
So, it sees danger maybe where danger doesn't exist.
So you have this like reactive state and you,
that kind of helps to explain why patients with PTSD
feel like they're re-experiencing the trauma,
because in the brain it looks like that.
We know that there's a region of the brain
called the hippocampus,
which is essential to memory formation.
We know that that is smaller in people who have PTSD.
But why it's smaller, you know,
were they born with a smaller hippocampus
or did it shrink after the trauma exposure?
This we do not know.
The frontal lobe, the part of our brains
that help us organize, help us plan,
help us show good judgment,
that is underactive in people who have PTSD.
So, you can start to get a sense of why people with PTSD
may appear impulsive or reckless or, you know,
quick to anger, because they're reacting to stimuli
that make them feel that they're in danger.
And then the part of their brain that would help them
maybe rationalize or slow down just isn't kicking in.
So, when we're looking at your MRI DTI,
what we're seeing is, it's a little bit irregular, okay?
And there's a little bit of gapyness.
Like, here is a gap.
Here is some truncated fiber tracts here.
Anytime there is a truncation of a fiber tract,
that indicates an area of injury.
Hmm.
Veterans typically come to me with diagnosis
of both concussion and PTSD.
There is a tremendous overlap.
And, it's also important to remember
that you do not have a thought, you do not have a feeling,
you did not have a behavior
that does not come from your brain.
So, the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder
overlap with the symptoms of post-concussion syndrome.
From the time that you're internally traumatized,
it changes your whole ability to function normally.
I could tell you to get over it all day long,
but you don't have that ability.
Your brain will register that traumatic experience
the same way as if you fall and hit your head.
So, when you're traumatized, you're actually,
your brain has been injured.
To frame PTS as an injury, as a wound,
gives troops,
gives any of us as human beings, a context for that.
We all know what it is to be injured.
Well, in this case, you had this experience and it injured,
it injured you.
Some people have called it a soul injury,
which cascades across the entire mind-body system.
But if you have an injury,
well then there are certain things you can do to prevent it.
There are certainly things you can do to treat it,
to intervene early.
And, if you don't do those things,
then, you know, you may suffer even worse consequences
down the line.
We've lived here now for five generations.
My great-grandfather at one point lived here.
And we actually call this the healing house.
All of us kids, there are three of us,
we've all come back here at some point
to heal from something.
It's difficult to explain what living with PTSD is like.
I never felt safe again.
And, that's something that,
I still don't feel safe to this day.
I have felt guilt and shame every day of my life,
for every aspect of my life.
I feel guilt and shame when I think about
the experience I had,
guilt that I can't,
I rely on my mother to help me raise my children.
This is going to impact every aspect of her life,
her professional life, her life with her kids,
her life with men, this is going to be with her forever.
It is a permanent disability.
I blame the military, the chain of command,
the people that didn't want to believe what she had to say,
they helped create a disability that will be lifelong.
We spend months and months and months,
and hundreds of thousands of dollars
getting our kids ready to go to war.
And we spend about 15 or 20 minutes
and 50 cents bringing them back.
I think that deceleration needs to have just as much,
just as much if not more emphasis
as getting somebody ready to go to war.
I feel like if it takes you six months
to get ready to go to war, it should take you six months
to come home from war.
Now we have better medical and psychological science,
we have better answers, we know what we need to do.
We just have to be committed to doing it.
He came back different.
And so it was kind of a difficult time for us,
I think because I felt very helpless.
He wasn't himself and I couldn't get to him.
Like I couldn't get him to...
And you're looking at him
and you remember a different person
than what's in front of you, so it's hard.
It's almost like you're mourning the loss of your husband
who's sitting in front of you,
but it's like a shell version of him, it's not him.
We're asking a lot of our soldiers,
to like continue to go overseas
and to continue to face the fight.
PTSD, I mean, everybody's different.
Everybody's got their limits, and some people,
it takes longer to reach that limit than others
and after a while it just starts to stack up
and there's no escaping it.
Guys are going to struggle.
Guys are going to have the nightmares.
Guys are going to be hyper-vigilant.
Guys are going to not want to be in big crowds.
Like I have my own struggles with those things,
what would be considered post-traumatic stress quirks
like waking up in the middle of the night,
having trouble sleeping.
You can never take the things
that I've seen out of my head.
At the time,
you just got to unplug your mind from it
and take care of what's presented to you.
Are you comfortable sharing some stories?
No, no, no.
I think I'm mentally blocking myself from those dark times
so that I don't go back to them,
that I tend to push those demons to the back and I won't...
I don't want to be vulnerable.
Like guys don't want to be vulnerable.
They don't want to show vulnerability.
But I also know that I can't go through life
and not try to move forward and to do those things again.
One day I was a soldier and the next day,
I was just a civilian just like that.
No help, no resources.
I didn't know anybody, I didn't know what I was doing.
So it got really, really bad, really, really dark.
I was drinking a lot.
Like I was drinking like a fifth of gin every night
just to be able to go to sleep.
I was sleeping with my gun under my pillow.
And when I was sleeping on my dad's couch,
he woke me up one time, he touched me
and I pulled my gun on him cause I didn't know who he was.
I didn't know what he was.
We're asleep, but we're never really asleep.
Maybe it's something our subconscious is awake and our ears
are listening, but we're never really asleep.
It's like that right now.
I am officially retired from the military due to injuries
that I sustained over the course of my military career.
I think the important thing for a soldier to understand
is that the military is the only institution
that takes your primary group of family
and not necessarily crushes it,
but military inculcates their values on you,
takes your primary group, gives you a new one,
and there is nothing better than that,
the entire feeling of it.
When you're deployed,
you are living with 163 other people
and is a life and death situation.
Hollywood can stigmatize it all they want,
but it is so real and there's no better feeling
and I think it's because of the stuff that you go through
and the things that you share.
We did life together.
You don't do do life together in every job that you have,
but we did life together.
And when you're living like that 12 months,
15 months multiple times,
and then you come back and you transition out
or you just come back to not living every day,
you want to go back.
I don't want to leave when I got medically retired.
Transition is hard.
Their sense of belonging, it's gone, their isolation.
We look different, we talk different.
I tell a story and people go, what's a platoon?
So it's hard.
It's really, really hard.
One night, I hung out with some of the guys
and it turned into
probably one of the most traumatic experiences
I've ever had.
I woke up naked on the floor of a trailer the next morning.
I was doing my best to try to just survive after that
because there were moments
where I didn't want to live anymore.
They'd taken everything from me,
they'd taken a piece of my soul.
I went and put my daughter down in her bed,
kissed her forehead,
and I had one dose left of the heroin that I had purchased.
And so I went into the bathroom and I locked the door
and tried to do it really quick so my wife wouldn't know
anything was happening.
And I used the drug the same way I had
every single time before the same amount.
I don't know what happened,
the drug hit me and right away I knew
something was different and I hit the ground and went black
and that's the last thing I remember.
I had people tell me constantly,
there's something wrong with you.
And I'm Italian, so I have a helicopter mom.
So she flew from New York to Missouri
to tell me that there's something wrong with me.
But as a soldier,
and people say it all the time, oh, we got to suck it up
and fix it, we got to suck it up and move on
and you'll hear that time and time again from your veteran.
I'm fine, well fine stands for up,
[BLEEP], insecure, neurotic, and emotional.
So we have to address that.
Anybody who lives with PTSD
lives with an elevated risk of death by suicide.
It not only impacts the brain, it impacts your body.
You're more likely to have...
PTSD is an independent risk factor for heart disease.
You're more likely to have issues with obesity, cancer,
more likely to die prematurely if you have PTSD.
I mean, this is really, really serious.
So I feel like the more we take it seriously as a society
and as a culture, that's the biggest hurdle.
Being able to effectively identify who is at risk
and then employ the right treatment is incredibly difficult,
but we work every day to be able to do that.
When we think about suicide rates,
following our last major combat deployments,
our suicide rates have remained high.
We don't know what about a particular exposure
we'll predispose someone that goes on to committing suicide.
Suicide is so multifactorial.
We're trying our best every day to not only understand it,
but also to develop effective treatment strategies
to address it.
It's a national tragedy
that veterans are dying by suicide.
I believe and I've seen reports and I've done my research,
the numbers are much higher because there are states
that don't report.
There are about 15 states that don't report
and there are veterans out there
that don't identify as veterans.
So if I'm not identifying as a veteran,
I die by suicide,
my family is isolated from me, friends, whoever.
Medical examiner's not putting that on the report
and we're not counting you.
So the numbers, instead of 22 a day,
which is the number we're all familiar with,
it's more like in the thirties, 35.
I mean it's horrible, horrible.
Let's add in rape, let's add in rape.
When we add in sexual trauma from the military,
the risk for suicide is 15 times higher for women
and four times higher for men when we add in sexual trauma.
I was never sexually assaulted in the military, thank God,
and there's so many people, men and women,
that have been sexually assaulted a lot
that have not come to the forefront.
One in three women, one in three women,
and this is a recent report that I've seen
cause I'm interested in this and one in 17 men.
Well those numbers are probably bullshit
because who's going to report to their chain of command
if they feel like the chain of command's
not going to do things?
The biggest problem we have,
in my opinion on the culture of the military,
is a culture of disbelief.
It permeates from the top down this idea that women and men
who come forward
and say they've been sexually assaulted are lying.
They are held to a standard that no other crime victim
has held to at the very top.
To have it happen more than once,
I just knew I had to do something different
than sitting back and doing nothing
was not the answer anymore.
I reported it so that they could find out what happened.
The same day that I reported it,
my unit had a sexual assault awareness class
and made me participate where all the questions
were directed right towards me.
Like everybody had already heard what happened.
So I wound up just getting up and walking out.
When I decided to take them to court,
my unit tried to convince me to drop the charges.
Retaliation numbers are through the roof.
About 60% of the men and women who report a sexual assault
to retaliated against,
that retaliation can often lead to suicide,
it can often lead to
people being pushed out of the military.
The DoD Inspector General did a report in 2016 that found
one in three women who reported sexual assault
are forced out of the military within a year of reporting.
So everything is violated when it comes to the norms
of what you would expect.
With our women, they do describe it as just betrayal
by someone who's supposed to be their brother,
who is supposed to watch their back.
And so for them, trust issues become really paramount
because if I can't trust my brother in arms,
then who can I trust?
For men, they don't come forward
primarily because of shame and embarrassment.
A sense of,
or a belief that I wasn't strong enough to protect myself
or to fight my attackers off or I was too weak.
As much as there's a disbelief for women
and victim blaming for women,
I think it's even greater for men.
So how could a man be sexually assaulted?
You're a man, you're a soldier,
you should be able to fight back
and there's so much misunderstanding of the nature
of sexual assault and affects of trauma
that I think for men,
it's like why'd this happen?
You must have wanted this.
You must really be a homosexual
is what what a lot of people say.
Year after year in the US military,
men and women are brutally raped and sexually assaulted.
We need a military justice system
that is worthy of the sacrifice that the men and women
in our military make every day for us.
And right now we don't have it.
Justice is not possible for so many survivors
of military sexual assault.
The conviction rate of even just the cases that go forward
is only 9% and if you estimated all cases,
it's less than 1%.
All of this eventually goes back to the people
wearing stars, generals and admirals.
How are they addressing this?
Well, poorly is the answer.
So chain of command now sees somebody
who is a burden to them instead of somebody
who is a survivor needing help.
I decided I was going to push through no matter what.
I did not drop the charges, no.
I was going to fight this time.
I didn't fight the first time and I feel like I should have.
I worry that that person got away with it
and would continue to do it to other females.
And I was determined to make sure that didn't happen again.
During court, they wouldn't let me participate
in the hearing.
The only time they called me in
is during character witnesses where they
essentially made me out to be promiscuous.
And that was their excuse for taking advantage of me,
which today has really left me...
It feels like a hole,
like there was no closure.
Something like military sexual trauma where you are unable
to do something and get away from that situation
is going to lead to post-traumatic stress.
I knew I was doing destructive behavior to myself,
didn't care that I was doing it,
but I was smart enough to know I'm doing it.
And I also was smart enough to know that nothing good
is going to come of this.
Once I was released from jail,
the first thing that I thought to myself was
where am I going to live
cause I was coming out of homelessness,
going into incarceration.
So I had to first figure out, well,
how am I going to get my needs met?
I need a roof over my head.
I need something to eat.
I need my kids to be taken care of.
I needed my basic needs met in order for me
to continue to heal.
So one day I was like I can't do this.
And that's when I started going to therapy,
going to see people at the VA,
talking to my caseworker and therapist and all that stuff.
I was battling with that whole,
do I deserve to go to the VA
because I'm not a combat soldier.
It was more like, well I didn't see any combat,
so why would I go to the VA?
When I went there to get support,
I met a lot of barriers to mental health support.
My therapist and I, although I liked her as a person,
we just didn't connect a lot of the mental health support
in my area were not veterans themselves.
So I think there's already that cultural barrier.
You can educate yourself a lot,
but if you are not willing to kind of meet your client
where they are or really understand
the total holistic veteran experience,
sometimes it can be very difficult
to build that therapeutic relationship.
So I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and my dad
picked me up on a Friday in Fayetteville
and we drove 24 hours straight home to Safford.
On Monday, I was at the Phoenix VA trying to go in
and see a mental health provider.
I was ready and willing.
The lady at the front desk said,
the fastest I can get you in is six months from now.
And I was just kind of blown away by that
and I said what am I supposed to do in the meantime?
I knew that's where I needed to be,
but getting the help that you need is hard.
And so I went home and tried to survive
until I could go back and get that appointment.
And that was April.
When October came,
I was so ready to just get the help that I needed
and I went, drove to Phoenix and had the appointment card
that came in the mail that said I had an appointment
at that time and on that day
and I went up to the desk and the lady said,
I'm sorry but we have no record of you
having an appointment.
And I was like, well, okay, what do I do?
She said, well, I can get you in three months from now.
And in that nine months, my life just completely spiraled.
Because of the back injury that I sustained in combat,
I was prescribed oxycodone.
I began to use that to self-medicate
the emotional pain that I had.
In my mind, I had no other way to survive to mask that pain.
I did all the group therapies.
I did an inpatient program
for like three months at the hospital.
That didn't help.
The thing that helped me the most, believe it or not,
was this young black woman.
I think she was maybe a few years older than me.
At the West Palm Beach VA, she was my case worker
and we would just sit and talk.
She wouldn't talk to me about combat,
we would just talk about life.
And that was the first person I opened up to ever.
For me, I've done art therapy,
I've done [BLEEP] sock puppets.
Like literally we put puppets on our hand and talk.
That didn't work.
I've done cognitive processing therapy
where they put the electrodes and the tens all on you.
I've done group therapy, I've done individual therapy.
None of that worked.
For me, it was just talking, that's what worked.
I'm Kim Bailey, founder of Invisible Combat.
We are here to honor specialist Vanessa Guillen
and to hold a space for healing,
but most importantly a place to celebrate who she was
and the impact that her young life has had
on our women veteran community.
When I first started Invisible Combat,
it was meant to be something small,
like a peer support here in Fresno County
because I wasn't able to find any
when I went looking for it myself.
And so I was like, well, I'm just going to start one.
I'm Kim, I run the support network, Invisible Combat.
And so I'm just really glad for you guys to be here.
I know for me right after it happened,
I was like, this can't be that bad
and I don't think anyone's going to understand
and I'm not going to talk about it
and so I minimized it like maybe it was my fault.
Have you all resonated with that?
Definitely, just kind of like,
that's just the way things are.
The Veterans Administration has said
that the risk of PTS
is greater from MST than it is from combat.
That should tell us something.
And what's sad about that is that that is not accepted
within leadership and so there's an attitude that, oh,
he should be over this by now, walk it off.
It wasn't that bad, but a number of events happened.
They really have pushed for reform.
One of the big ones was the murder of Vanessa Guillen
and the follow-on investigation at Fort Hood,
which really decimated the generals and admirals claim
that they were solving this and taking it seriously.
So welcome to Shockopolis.
The thing that we wanted to create when you first walk in,
it's open, there's amazing energy,
we got the suicide prevention colors
of Operation Shock Wave, which is teal and purple,
the themes throughout,
but more importantly it feels like a home and you can get
all the resources that you need
cause that's what we're all about.
This is Lola.
She's the mama of the group.
Everybody that comes here and leaves with a smile
on their face and this is all we want to do.
This is all we want to do.
So these are those things that sound so crazy,
like equine therapy and you don't even ride the horse
or service dogs or reiki or Tai Chi or yoga, acupuncture.
But you know what, they are the bridge
between the dysregulated mind-body system
and the healthy system which is capable of restoring safe
and productive relationships.
My hopes and dreams for the nonprofit is to work with
children and dogs and veterans,
all the things that I truly appreciate and love in life.
So they're bringing both dogs down.
I'm going to adopt Mac into our program.
That is a big part of managing my PTSD
because if I wasn't doing that,
I'd just be sitting around looking for something to do.
And that's what I'm able to kind of focus on right now
and if I stopped doing dogs tomorrow and sat on my couch
for a couple weeks, I mean I would probably be dark again.
I think Travis has a lot of survivor's guilt.
He's lost a lot of friends in the war.
I think for him to transition
into not deploying and not being active,
he's got to be doing something to help other soldiers
or he will feel like he's doing them a disservice
or a dishonor to them.
He's one of those that will end up helping himself
by helping other people because the idea of him sitting down
and focusing on himself is just not his nature.
When you're on a team and you have that cohesion
with each other,
and you leave and you're on your own,
it's hard to be on your own.
And so these dogs allow for these guys
to have a feeling like they're not on their own anymore
and it helps me to help my brothers
so it's like the ultimate win.
It's almost like a dog.
Like I'm not good and he wants to make me feel better.
Look at it, look at it.
I'm okay Arlo.
I didn't know that they were this friendly.
And that's why we do this.
They know I'm not feeling good and they want to help me.
I want to rise above and I want to perform.
I want to accomplish great things
so that's driven me to take on a lot of responsibility,
a lot of stress.
Probably take on too many things.
I was a city council member.
I was running an addiction recovery nonprofit.
I was a firefighter, I was a full-time student.
I had a young family.
I had responsibilities in my church.
I got some help for the addiction and I got clean and sober.
You do have to find a purpose and you do have to find
a mission to accomplish
cause that is very therapeutic in healing
and that's what I did.
And for a long time, that works.
But in my case and a lot of cases that I know about,
there comes a time where that's not enough.
I was approached to run for Congress,
so it was something that I threw my whole heart into again.
I knew that that platform would it allow me to continue
the progress that I had made on the issues of addiction
and post-traumatic stress and veterans issues
and that became my platform.
The stress of the congressional campaign
and I was having nightmares a lot.
I was not sleeping very well.
I got complacent again
and I lost sight of keeping on top of that demon
and that recovery.
Recovery took a backseat,
my spirituality took a backseat and I was using heroin.
And that's the only time I've been able to really
get refreshing sleep and be ready for the next day
of the big schedule that I had
and before I knew it, I was right back in that cycle,
but I also felt like I couldn't come out
and say I need help.
I look at my inbox every morning and see
heartfelt messages of people who said that I gave them hope,
that they are in recovery because they look to me.
And I felt like if I came out and said
I've relapsed and I'm struggling and I need help
that lots of people would lose hope.
And so I just tried to hide it and keep going.
Hanky boy, warming up.
Hey baby boy, are you going to mess around today?
The way post-traumatic stress manifests in us as individuals
is we see something that is life-threatening.
We had a squad that ran over a small child there.
And whether that happens to you
or it happens to somebody else, that is an issue,
that causes trauma.
And when trauma is embedded in the limbic system,
and this is where our emotions are,
causes feelings of elation
or feelings of true despair and fear of death.
And then that is stored by what I consider to be
a little gnome.
He puts it in a filing cabinet and he stores it
and when we have similar feelings of anxiety
or similar feelings of paranoia,
he takes that out and he goes, remember this,
and he brings it forth again.
And it could be the smallest thing, a smell, a sound,
just something that reminds you.
You see somebody dressed similarly, could be the dark.
We need to clear out that file
so that we can start living a life again that we deserve.
Like if you go in here and you brave the chicken poop,
you can usually catch a chicken like this.
We actually took a chicken on an alpaca walk once.
We had a young fellow with some learning disabilities
and he loves chickens.
So we put a harness on the chicken
and actually took it on the walk,
and that's as quick as the healing goes.
And then you have to start over again
because it's an iterative process now.
I mean it is though because trauma compounds
and healing compounds,
but that's part of the fun out in the farm.
This is your left temporal lobe from a different angle.
In this image we were looking from the top down
and this looks like very good fiber tracking.
I know you said that you have difficulty with memory
and seeing good fiber tracks in the temporal lobe
doesn't mean you don't have memory trouble.
It just means that anatomically, things look pretty good,
but we know that things are not perfect.
So let's take a break for a minute.
So do you think I have a traumatic brain?
I do, I do.
What does that look like for my future?
Well when I put together your clinical
history, visual focus, attention concentration and memory,
sleep, balance, emotion,
those are the five pillars of concussion.
So clinically that says yes,
you have a post-concussion syndrome or a TBI.
Then we do these images and we say yes,
we do see injury and we do other testing, endocrine testing,
toxicity test and do a nutrient optimization protocol
to give you the best chance to heal from your brain injury.
The hyperbaric oxygen therapy
is a different component of the healing.
I've been researching a lot about...
the hyperbaric stuff.
I'm not 100% sure but via the military,
I think I have access to it.
So that's something that I've been wanting to go
and see if that's something I can do to...
I want to be the best me that I can be,
and I'm tired of the sleep issues,
I'm tired of the memory loss,
I'm tired of the personality changes.
Those are all post-concussion syndrome,
those are all TBI symptoms and we emphasize healing
because if you do not heal from a brain injury condition,
then you progress into an early neurodegenerative syndrome.
Neurodegenerative syndromes are things like Alzheimer's,
Parkinson's, multi-system atrophy, things like that.
Yeah, I don't want any of that.
The more exposure you have,
the more injury you have and the longer healing
is going to take and it's probably almost a miracle
that he's as functional as he is after that much exposure.
Early in the post 9/11 era,
now I'm talking about 2002, 2003,
before we then invaded Iraq,
our political leaders and our military leaders
had bought into this notion
that it was going to be a cakewalk.
Well, it didn't quite work out that way.
There's probably no organization in the world
that cares about PTSD more than the VA
and it cares about it,
not only in spirit but literally in terms of putting money
and resources behind it,
in terms of research and clinical services.
What are the best practices
or what have you found your work that works with PTSD?
My approach is look really hard at the data
that is available and then come up
with evidence-based guidelines from there.
And so that really forms the foundation
with which we provide care at the VA.
So I think the key thing is, is not one size fits all.
We have an array of options that we tailor to the person
depending on the individual story
cause I've never met two patients who have PTSD
who are alike.
So if there's something you wake up at night about,
if there's an image that sticks with you,
that moment is what I want to go after, brother.
I'm not saying it's easy, easy, I know it's not,
but we're going to do it anyway.
You don't have to give me names,
you can tell me as much as you want or don't want.
Just one of our guys got ambushed.
You were the medic primary on that, I gotcha.
What do you want to call it?
Let's give it a name.
Bad day.
Primarily in our clinic and throughout the VA,
the treatments that really address trauma,
there are three treatments that we use right now in the VA,
all three are evidence-based.
The cognitive processing therapy treatment,
prolonged exposure treatment and eye movement,
and desensitization reprocessing treatment.
The VA and the DoD
have actually done a lot of good work together
developing joint guidelines, treatment guidelines
over the years.
I will say that their emphasis on what they call
the gold standard evidence-based treatments
of prolonged exposure therapy
and cognitive processing therapy I think are misguided.
In the case of prolonged exposure therapy,
I think it's an ethical issue.
One of the reasons I retired from the army when I did
is that I could no longer sell
what the army had bought.
Here's the challenge,
only half of troops who acknowledged that they needed help
would actually seek it.
Of those who sought treatment,
only half went back for a second session.
And of those who went back for more than one session,
only half experience an improvement in their symptoms.
So that's what we were up against.
The biggest area where we need to continue
to put a dent is in access.
Now, unfortunately, a lot of veterans aren't even making it
so mental healthcare to access is still the big...
nut to crack, it really asks us as a society,
like how much do we really care about mental health?
How much are we willing to understand the extent
of what a problem it is.
I mean, it can be years before people get diagnosed.
The data shows
and that's really hard because the longer you wait,
the more complicated it gets
and the more entrenched the symptoms get.
The longer you wait for treatment,
the harder this is going to get to treat.
So let's just get in there quicker.
I think it can be problematic
to try to do cognitive behavior therapy
or other kinds of therapy in someone
with a very injured or toxic brain.
So the first step in treating somebody
with these kind of diagnosis is to biologically,
physiologically heal the brain.
And it is not just the concussion injury
that causes symptoms,
it is also the overlay of toxicity
that so many of our veterans experience
from their exposure to burn pits.
Many of them tell me that 24/7,
every day of their deployment,
they were exposed to thick black smoke
where everything was burning and it was burning close
to where they were eating and sleeping and living.
And when I think about healing a veteran
or healing a brain after that kind of injury,
I think the first step
is creating biological, physiological healing.
When you think about like prolonged exposure treatment,
which has been one of the gold standard treatments for PTSD,
you're essentially kind of flooding yourself
with these traumatic memories
and hoping to kind of desensitize yourself
to that over time.
But with the approach with MDMA
is that you're looking at these memories
with compassion and self-love.
MDMA, we believe at maps puts patients
in contact with their what we call the inner healer.
What we think is happening with MDMA therapy
is that the trauma has been removed,
but there's this scar,
this PTSD type scar that we're working with
and removing the roadblocks so that
the natural kind of healing process can occur.
We saw that approximately two thirds of patients
no longer met criteria for PTSD at one year.
I think we are far from over
in terms of what PTSD treatment looks like.
I think this is an evolving landscape as it should be
cause one size does not fit all.
We need a whole array of treatments.
And I do think things like, ketamine, MDMA,
medical marijuana, these have all been possible treatments
that have shown some early effectiveness vis-a-vis data,
certainly with MDMA assisted therapy,
there was a recent study
which yielded some very encouraging results.
Well, I think what was interesting
with the MDMA psychotherapy assisted study
was this though that they said in that study,
the MDMA wasn't the cure,
it was more like a catalyst
because there's a whole lot of therapy that goes on around
and what the MDMA helps
is release some of that blockage or makes it easier
for the person to talk so that the psychotherapy
can be more effective.
So my feeling is the future
is probably going to be in these hybrid models.
I'm excited, but I'm cautiously optimistic.
There's still a few hurdles through the FDA
because safety is number one priority.
I feel like as a clinician, my first thing is do no harm.
And what you got to understand is when people are suffering,
they don't have objectivity,
they just want something that's going to help them.
And I think that's my job to make sure
that we're not doing anything that causes harm.
So there are still some hurdles to FDA, but yeah,
once those are passed, well, why not?
Going through therapy
isn't going to make you forget what happened.
It's not going to make you forget trauma.
You are forever changed
after experiencing a major life trauma.
But it'll put you back in the driver's seat of your own car.
When a person has been exposed to combat trauma,
it's important for people around them, their commanders,
their behavioral health providers
to be aware of what they've been exposed to,
and be aware of changes in their behavior
that may be suggestive of them
needing a higher level of support.
Early on, I encountered a lot of veterans
that really needed a comprehensive treatment program,
treatments that are not provided currently at the VA.
There is a big push in Congress right now for the VA
to be studying what they're calling alternative therapies
to treat all these veterans.
Can everybody hear me?
So my name is Isaiah James.
I'm senior policy advisor for the Black Veterans Project.
I was exposed to burn pits.
I got two tours in Iraq,
one tour in Afghanistan as a combat infantryman.
But I don't want to talk about myself,
but I want to talk about millions of veterans
across this nation that are denied healthcare
and benefits from the very government
that they were called to serve.
When I saw nobody gave a damn about PTSD,
I saw somebody had to fight.
All morning, you've heard
about why we need to pass this bill.
I got to fight to make people's lives better.
The Army trained me to do that.
They trained me to go without sleep.
They trained me to go without food.
They trained me to never give up.
Now my fight's just in a different venue.
Those 100 senators who are now going to take this bill up,
the fate is in your hands now.
When women report military sexual trauma
to their chains of commands,
they reported being retaliated against 62% of the time.
70% of the time when a report for sexual violence
came across a commanding officer's desk, they did nothing.
The major battle on Capitol Hill has been
who are going to give authority to
to make prosecution decisions.
And so the chain of command,
the generals and admirals have clung
to a 250 year old tradition
that commanders make prosecution decisions.
And Congress has said, no,
we should be moving this towards prosecutors
making these decisions.
We want all of us protected.
We all deserve to be protected,
we want legislation that protects all of us.
We gave you our lives, we gave you our mental health,
we gave you our very physical bodies.
We laid it out for this nation.
All we are asking for is not more.
We're not asking for less, we're asking for equal.
Give us what you promised us.
So this is a lamp.
Of course it has a light, but the light,
I want us to think about it in terms of us.
That's our core being, that's our...
However you want to think it as your spirit,
that's your core being.
That's who you were before the trauma.
And we have these scarfs here.
Some of them are a little bit transparent,
but these scarfs are going to represent like
just individual traumas that we've experienced.
You just put it right over the lamp
and I want you to notice how the light got dimmer,
but you can still kind of see it
peeking through a little bit
and I just want to leave you guys with hope
that that's you, you're there.
You've never gone away.
And we just have to heal collectively
in order to get back to that space.
You ready for this?
Okay, here it comes.
He's going to dock dive.
For me to deal with my issues is really important
because I love my family and I don't want to lose my family.
I want to reconnect.
He's a good dog.
For me to come out on top of this as a good person
who my family wants to be around is really important to me.
Going for a big one.
I'm 100% sure that I'd see more dark days.
I don't know how many, like I don't know when,
I don't know why,
but my ultimate goal is to have less and less of those
and to be able to do this and I'm still alive,
so I must still be succeeding.
I wish I would've fought harder
the first time it happened to me and not just let it go.
Sometimes the people around you
think they're doing you a favor, but maybe they're not
and you have to make that decision on your own,
what kind of fight, what you're willing to fight for.
It took me a second time to realize
that I was worth fighting for
and I hope that other people find that
in themselves as well
if they ever find themselves in that type of situation.
Everybody who's been through basic training knows
that if you're going through hell, keep going.
Don't stop there.
If you're living in hell right now, why would you stop?
Why would you...
After everything you've been through,
why would you quit right now?
It's the worst place to stop.
That's the bad neighborhood.
Keep going, get out of there.
Just go get help, go do it.
Get off your ass, get up.
Go to your nearest VA, go to a VFW post.
Go to a Wounded Warrior place,
go to anywhere and go talk to somebody.
I guarantee you six degrees of separation,
they can point you in the right direction.
They can get you the help you need.
I needed to hear that, I love you.
I love you too, I love you too.