Other People Have It Worse: Veteran Jason Kander on PTSD & recognizing you need help

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I know two things that thankfully most Americans never come
to know, which is what it is like to have
a reasonable fear of being killed violently, and to what
it is like to prepare yourself on a nearly daily
basis to violently take other human lives. To put yourself
in that place for any period of time. It changes

(00:22):
your brain chemistry, and it changes the way your brain
and yourself interacts with the rest of the world. This
year After and I'm your host Megan Divine, author of
the best selling book It's Okay that You're Not Okay.
This week on Hereafter, author and veteran Jason Kander joins
me to talk about post traumatic stress disorder and what

(00:45):
it really takes to recognize that you, yes, you deserve
help and support, settling everybody. All of that coming up
right after this first break. Before we get started, one

(01:06):
quick note. While we cover a lot of relational emotional
territory in each and every episode, and in this particular
episode we talk a lot about therapy, this show is
not a substitute for skilled support with a licensed mental
health provider or for professional supervision related to your work.
Content note for this episode, friends, we do talk about

(01:27):
post traumatic stress disorder, we talk about substance use, we
talk about suicidality, and there are a few instances of
medium swearing. Just so you know, hey, friends. Now, I
love all of my guests and all of my episodes,

(01:49):
but this episode is really special. I have been fascinated
with the experience of returning veterans for decades. I think,
like even before I was in grad school, so does
a long time. Now it's it's a long time, but
from the ways that our military is trained to the
things we expect of veterans when they returned to civilian life,

(02:11):
it's such a complex and complicated issue. And for somebody
who isn't part of the military and doesn't come from
a military family, I'm not really sure where I got
my fascination for all of this stuff, but it really
has been something on my mind for decades. Today's guest
was such a joy to talk to. I feel like

(02:32):
I finally got to have a conversation about something that
I'd wanted to have for a really long time. Jason
Kander joined the Army National Guard in two thousand five
after getting a law degree at Georgetown University. He deployed
in two thousand and six to Afghanistan, where his mission
was to assess the corruption levels of former Afghan warlords

(02:52):
and government leaders. What that means is he spent his
time traveling dangerous roads in an unarmored suv to meet
armed men with, as he says, questionable allegiances. He usually
had no backup other than his Afghan interpreter. Ten years
after serving in Afghanistan, Jason Kander was a rising star

(03:14):
in the Democratic Party. He was exploring a presidential run,
but outside of that political spotlight, he was racked by
nightmares and oppression and suicidal thoughts. Those symptoms were so
persistent and so obvious to the people around him that
whenever his wife returned home with the couple's then five
year old son, she actually made sure to go into

(03:36):
the house first, just in case her husband was dead
inside the house. In two thousand eighteen, Jason shocked the
political world when he ended his campaign for the mayor
of Kansas City to seek treatment for PTSD. He talks
about all this in his new book, Invisible Storm, a
Soldier's Memoir of Politics and PTSD. So, Jason, I am

(04:00):
so glad you're here. Welcome to the show. Thank you
very much. For having me. I appreciate it absolutely, So
I want to spend most of our time together focused
on mental health and the culture of shame and denial
that's so prevalent, not just in the military but for
men in general. So the usual light topic here, But
to get us started, can you give us just like

(04:22):
a short summary of your role in the military and
where you serve. Sure, I was a military intelligence officer
in the United States Army. I served at employment to
Afghanistan in two thousand and six, where my main function
was to do anti corruption and the anti espionage investigations
of people in the Afghan military and Afghan government. So
you write a lot about feeling like your experiences in

(04:44):
the military weren't bad enough, bad enough and air quotes here,
but they weren't bad enough to warrant being affected by them.
Can you take me into that a little bit. Yeah,
you know, when I landed in Afghanistan, my idea of
combat was what I had seen in the movies, and
you know, just a very conventional concept of combat like

(05:05):
a lot of us have, which is bullets whizzened by
your ear shooting back at people, and bombs going off
around you. That's what I felt combat was, and I
never really came to a different conclusion until many years later,
and then what I actually experienced over there was something
very different. I, as an intelligence officer, was routinely going

(05:25):
outside the wire, just me and my translator, oftentimes in
street clothes, to meet with people who were very unsavory,
characters of questionable allegiances, who you know, there was always
a reasonable possibility that we were walking into a trap
and could be kidnapped or killed. And in my mind,
because I never fired my weapon, that was not combat

(05:46):
and that didn't count. And so when I came home
and I started to have all these symptoms as a result,
I just spent a lot of time discounting that and saying, well,
that can't be related to my deployment because I didn't
fire my weapon. And it was until over a decade
later when I was at the v A that somebody
explained it back to me, and I listened to it

(06:07):
as if they were talking about somebody else. You know,
you were in the most dangerous place in the planet,
alone for hours at a time, totally vulnerable. Nobody knew
where you were, so nobody was coming to back you
up or rescue you, and that's combat, is what they said.
That you were very vulnerable and and that's a traumatic experience.
And so it took that for me to accept that idea. Yeah,
somebody saying looking at your experience and mirroring it back

(06:30):
and saying, no, this, this actually is combat, and it
it makes sense that you're affected by it. And I think,
you know, the this idea that we have that somebody
comes back from a deployment and they're just supposed to
instantly be okay, they're just supposed to like get a
job and care about parking spots and and WiFi, and

(06:50):
it's just it's like, it's always been fascinating to me
that we expect people to come back from these experiences,
come back from these jobs, and just like fit right
back in well. And it's not just that we expect
that of people, it's that we placed that expectation on them.
And it's not just it's not just combat veterans, it's
anybody who's undergone trauma, right, And so as a result,

(07:15):
I placed that expectation on myself, and I did so
for many years, and you know, I guess because that's
what everybody else was placing on me. But it's true
no matter what happens, Like if you have a divorce
and then you know people are just expecting you to
just get on with life like you might not be
able to right away. You might need to go see somebody.
That could be a traumatic experience. And so I think

(07:36):
that's for me one of the big lessons of the book.
It's that we don't automatically go back to being the
people we were. Were different, but that doesn't mean that
we're lesser. It just means we're different. You mentioned that
this is sort of normal for military. Yes, I love
that you brought that out. To like, anybody who goes
through something difficult is not the same person they were

(07:57):
when they went in. But that's sort of in heternalized
messaging of what you're about to do is no big deal.
Therefore you shouldn't be affected by that. In another interview,
you said, as long as you believe what you're doing
is normal and that other people have it worse, you
can do incredibly dangerous things. Yeah. So to me, that's

(08:17):
one of my big lessons of all this is that
there's what I call a necessary form of brainwashing in
the military, and some people I think take exception to
that because they don't feel it's necessary. I do. Like
the job I did going into these meetings over and
over again with people who I knew might want to
kill me, and they were usually I was usually outnumbered

(08:38):
and outgunned. In order to do that, I had to
genuinely feel like, well, this isn't a big deal. And
the thing is, you get that message pretty clearly as
soon as you arrive in the military for the first time,
like in basic, and then it's sort of in the
air the whole rest of the time. And you know,
like I got a very close buddy who was on
patrols and on missions and was shot at nearly every day,

(08:58):
and so by the same token for him to keep
going back out like, he's got to feel like what
he's going through is not as bad as the next
squad over. So in order to do these jobs, you
have to have this necessary form of brainwashing. It's just
part of it. My problem with how the military handles
it is the truly subpart job of disabusing us of
that notion, because then what happens is is that the

(09:21):
larger culture, who you know, people who want to help,
they tend to see it and this will ring true
to a lot of people when I say it as oh, well,
you know, the military has this very much, yesmo culture,
And what they think is they think guys like me
come out and think that, oh, going to get help
is weak and I'm not weak, and so that that
it says something weak about ourselves. I never really felt

(09:42):
that way very often. In fact, I was always encouraging
other people, other veterans I ran into who I thought
needed help to go get help, and I thought it
was a completely legitimate thing. It's just that I had
it on good authority that what I did was no
big deal. And once I gave voice to that, I
have heard from so many veterans like I'm talking and
people who didn't deploy all the way to Medal of

(10:03):
Honor recipients who feel like that's exactly what I felt.
I felt like what I did was no big deal,
because that's what they told me when we came out.
If they would educate us on the idea that actually
it was quite a big deal and you might need
some help, I think it would make a real difference.
Yeah there's that, Yeah, yeah, yeah, getting help is a
good thing. Everybody deserves help. If they've gone through a

(10:24):
hard time. But you can't you can't say that to
somebody who truly, truly believes that they didn't go through
a hard time because you told them they didn't exactly. Yeah,
So all of that I think applies very universally to
the population as a whole, not just to the military.
But here's the part that is particular to the military,
which is that pretty much the cardinal sin of the

(10:46):
military is the concept of stolen valor, which is to
have claimed to have done something you didn't, which, you know,
it's things at the most basic level, it's like if
you wear a medal that you weren't actually awarded. Right.
There was a congression candidate recently in Ohio who claimed
he deployed Afghanistan who turned Eddie, didn't that stolen valor? Well,
we take that concept so seriously that we are scared

(11:10):
to death of doing anything not because somebody will punish us,
but because of what we'll think about ourselves of doing
anything that could in any way feel like stolen vower.
The way that manifested for me, and I think it
does for a lot of other people as well, is
I felt like if I said out loud that what
I was experiencing was PTSD as a guy who didn't
fire his weapon. Now I can look back now and

(11:31):
realize I was in a lot of danger on a
regular basis, and there's every reason why I would have
had PTSD, But I didn't fire my weapon, and I
got friends who had to take lives and I never
had to. Well, that feels to me, or felt to
me like stolen valor. And that's the next layer that
I think makes it even more difficult for people in
the military to say I'm gonna go get help. Yeah,

(11:51):
there's that minimizing of your own behavior because you have told,
you've been told and trained to minimize it. Yeah. There's
something really fascinating in there about the way that we
train people to do impossible things and put themselves at
risk and put their friends at risk, and commit acts
of violence that in normal civilian life you probably would

(12:14):
not do. But it's it's really interesting that that tactic
is in a way of dissociation, right, or a justification.
This is necessary because of X, Y, and Z, and
you have to shut off the part of your mind
that says this is dangerous, this is risky, this is
wrong on some level for you know, wherever that fits

(12:36):
into that picture. But you you have to be able
to turn that off in order to do your job.
It's about turning that off. But I think it's also
just about the way your brain changes when it has
to prepare itself to take life. I read in another
book at one point where somebody had written, if you
go to war and come back the same, you should
probably go see someone because there's something wrong with you,

(12:58):
you know, And it's been easically point being you should
go see someone one way or the other right. And
for me, like the way I described that an invisible storm,
is that I now realized that I know something. I
know two things that thankfully most Americans never come to know,
which is what it is like to have a reasonable
fear of being killed violently, and to what it is

(13:21):
like to prepare yourself on a nearly daily basis to
violently take other human lives. To put yourself in that
place for any period of time. It changes your brain chemistry,
and it changes the way your brain and yourself interacts
with the rest of the world. And that's not something
that you can just easily and without support turn off.

(13:53):
This is hereafter and I'm your host, Megan Divine. We've
been talking with guest Jason Candor, author of the book
Invisible sty Warm. Let's get back to it. As I
was getting ready for this conversation with you, I was
thinking a lot about I think you wrote somewhere that
especially the Iraq and Afghanistan generation, it's not feeling like
they're allowed to be impacted by what they went through,

(14:14):
Like it's a shameful thing to be impacted. It reminded
me a lot of um. In World War One, you
could be executed for cowardice, right, cowardice meaning that you
were emotionally usually meaning that you were emotionally affected by
the death and the violence that you saw around you,
and you were unable to return to the fight. Right
that there's a there's a lot of grief and suffering

(14:36):
in there that not that long ago was reason to
be executed by the military. And like now we're trying
to say, wait a second, wait a second, let's carry
about your mental health like it's that's a big switch
within a few decades. Well, and even if you remove
the cowardice definition and the and the active duty element
of it, there's something that the World War one generation

(14:57):
and the warrant terror generation have in common people never
talk about, which is both of those generations served at
a time when service was not mandatory, and we are
going through a period, the longest consecutive period in American
history without some form of mandatory service. And what that
means for people who return home is that increasingly you

(15:20):
encounter people who don't have any way to relate to
your experience. So like when I came home and two
weeks later, I'm sitting at at my job at a
law firm. You know, I go from being in a
military intelligence officer in Afghanistan to I'm a first year
associate and a law firm. Nobody there had any clue
what I had experienced. It's not that they didn't want to,
it's that they did not have the capacity to in

(15:42):
any way relate to my experience. And even though you
can feel very supported and unlike the Vietnam generation, everybody
is thanking us for our service, and you're getting these
first class seats on airplanes and every restaurant has a
discount for you and all that stuff, it doesn't change
the fact that you stee that you feel incredibly lonely.
The difference being that, you know, when my grandfather and

(16:03):
my great uncle came back from World War two, when
others came back from Vietnam, there was a very high
chance that their closest friends had just had a very
similar experience, and therefore there was, for better or worse,
a community to still be a part of. Yeah, that
there is companionship and that shared experience, understanding, a sense

(16:26):
of feeling understood. And that's why I write in the
book about the Native American traditions that you know, had
these return rituals, so that if the tribe felt the
greater understanding and connectedness to what the warrior went through,
then the warrior would never have to feel alone in
the tribe. And we don't do anything like that. I
joke in the book that instead we give our veterans,

(16:47):
you know, a discount on a chicken feed to roll
up at Applebe's on Veterans Day and expect him to
be the same person they were before the war. It's
just not the same. It's not the same, and it's
it's sort of lip service to that, right, Like I
can say thank you for your service, and I'm sort
of off the hook. I don't need to listen. That's right.
We do a lot of letting people off the hook.
You know, I'm here to pug my book, but whatever.
There's a great book by Sebastian Younger called Tribe on

(17:10):
Homecoming and Belonging, and it inspired me a lot. And
so one of the things that he talks about in
that book is the importance of having these sort of
return rituals. And now there's sort of a fledgling movement
um that he has started and then I'm tangentially involved
with to create reverse town halls for veterans. So our concept,

(17:32):
of course of a town hall was like a politician
or anybody coming and speaking and then answering questions and
people kind of sound off and they listen, and this
would be something different. It would be the idea being
like on Veterans Day, on fourth of July, on all
these you know, quote unquote patriotic holidays, that the patriotic
thing to do would be to show up and listen

(17:52):
to veterans tell their story and not tell your own story,
and not ask questions and just listen to them in
order to sort of close the civil military divide. And
I think it's a very interesting idea. I love that.
One of the things I specifically love about that is
that you added, like, no questions, no sharing your own story.

(18:12):
This is a process of being seen and heard, right,
it's acknowledgement, and acknowledgement is one of the things that's
missing in that return, right, Like there was something that
you wrote. First of all, the problem is that when
you leave the military, they don't sit you down and
flip that switch off, that switch of like what you're
doing is no big deal, and other people have it worse, Like,

(18:34):
as you said, that's sort of a necessary brainwashing in
order to do the work at hand. But when you
leave your deployment or the military, there isn't the counterbalance
where people come back and go, oh, by the way,
that was really messed up ship that you did, and
you were in danger the whole time. There's something about
that power of acknowledgement and what I what I hear,
and what you just described as like an opportunity to

(18:56):
be seen and acknowledged for the truth of your own experience. Yeah,
me like that. Those acknowledgements came in things like going
to the v A and having people who work with
folks like me all the time, never be surprised by
anything I said and be able to say, oh, yeah, okay,
that makes sense, Like like to say something that I
had been feeling or thinking for a long time out
loud to a professional who goes, yeah, that makes sense,

(19:17):
here's why you feel that way. Combined with staying in
touch with or getting back in touch with people I
served with, you know, I didn't do a very good
job of staying in touch with the people I was
in Afghanistan with. And while writing the book and I
read about this towards the end, I reached out to
one of the two guys on my little camp over
there who did a similar job to me, one of which,

(19:38):
a year after we got home, had had actually taken
his own life. And then I reached out to the
other guy, this guy Todd, and I was like, you know,
this is what I've been through with therapy and everything,
and I just wanted to reach out to you to
make sure you know that. And it had been fourteen
years since we talked, and Todd was actually still an
active duty and was just getting off active duty. And
I remember it was really validating for me because he

(20:01):
outranked me. And when we were over there and and
he was. He explained to me that when I left,
he couldn't find someone to replace me, because, in his words,
he was, like, what we did was fucking insane, Jason.
And like for him to say, like, you know, literally,
like I tried people out and like one guy urinated
on himself, and you know, that was really important to me.

(20:23):
And you know, to find out that Todd actually had
been having all the same symptoms. And and so I
wrote about this in the book, not just for the
validation it offered to me, but because I just wrote
about what what would have happened if the three of
us had just stayed in touch from the very beginning
and known that all three of us were having these symptoms,
instead of individually each of us thinking well, we have

(20:44):
no right to these symptoms. I think it would have
made a real difference for all of us. It's interesting
because it reminds me a lot of what we tell
grieving people or folks who just had a life altering
illness or an injury, where like, don't dwell on it,
go and find other interests, go back to like the
things that you loved before, Like don't hang out with
all those grieving people don't hang out with all of

(21:05):
those sad folks over there, when really what you're describing
is the medicine, inasmuch as there is one, is in
finding the people who are in this soup with you
and telling the truth about it. I spent almost eleven
years trying to outrun it, and I couldn't. I'm pretty fast,
I'm not that fast. It's faster than me. And you know,

(21:29):
I've learned a lot about trauma. One of the most
important things I've learned about trauma is that you can't
outrun it. You've gotta go to it. You like, you
gotta confront it. It's like a bully. I mean, you're
not gonna avoid it every day when you have when
your class schedule is such that you're gonna you're gonna
see each other at lunch, like, eventually, you gotta fight it.

(21:49):
You don't gotta win, but you gotta. You gotta put
up enough of a fight to where it goes all right, fine,
you know it doesn't go away, but now you've got
it managed. And that's that's really what it is. And
you know, when you think about all these different therapies,
you know, I did cognitive processing therapy and I did
prolonged exposure with some vivo practice, But those are the
main ones. And then in addition to that, you've also

(22:11):
got E, M d R. What they all have in
common is they all require you to go to the
root of the trauma. They all require you to go
through it to get to the other side of post
traumatic growth. Yeah, they all ask you to keep your
eyes open to what hurts and to not avoid it.

(22:31):
And that's what you know. I spent over ten years
avoiding it, and it just after a period of time,
my coping mechanisms for avoidance, just like any other medicine,
they became less and less effective. I became immune to them. Yeah,
there's only so long you can push stup to the side,
or hold it down or compensate for it before it
will come back and kick your podya. That is the reality.

(22:52):
Somebody put it. I remember somebody in describing me at
some point said either you deal with your trauma or
your trauma deals with you. And that's that's accurate. That's
what happened for me for sure. I want to go
back to that sort of that blanket secret code of
not only not talking about violence and trauma, but not

(23:14):
recognizing that you went through trauma or that what you
experienced was crazy. There's this whole like culture of shame
and denial in there. I wonder about the costs of
that kind of shame and denial, and not just for veterans,
but also for men in general, Like what what does

(23:36):
that cost us to not be able to talk about
our actual experience. Well, for me, it costs me years
of enjoying my life, because shame is a very complicated thing, right,
I realize now that what I did with shame is
I used it to get a sense of control, which
is sounds strange, but I have done pack it. So

(23:58):
like I felt a lot of shame about not having
done enough in the military, and you know, people who
had gotten hurt or gotten killed and that you know,
here I was like theoretically enjoying my life because I
was succeeding professionally and you know, and all that, and
I had a family. So I felt a lot of
shame about that. But it wasn't until I went through
therapy that I came to understand that I was constantly

(24:22):
in search of control because in Afghanistan, what my brain
had learned was is that if I could control the situation,
I could survive. So for me, that meant things like
I needed to know where all the exits were all
the time. I need to know how many people were
between me and the vehicle that I came in, you know,
all that kind of stuff. I needed to know exactly

(24:43):
who was in the room with me, and if I didn't,
then that was a big problem. And so I you know,
my nightmares would be you know, generally about being kidnapped
because of the prospect of that when I was overseas,
but sometimes the nightmare what would set off that part
of the nightmare would literally just be a regular household
item being not where it was supposed to be, right.
So control was a huge part of my PTSD still is.

(25:06):
So the things that I relied on to feel an
illusion of control, where things like anger like that would
have a low level simmering anger because I used that
when I was overseas to put myself in a in
a place, in a mindset where I could take a
life if I needed to. But then also eventually shame
because it became like if I could feel like I
understood that I was just not a good person, well

(25:28):
then I felt like I understood something, and then I
felt a sense of control, and I felt like the
way I could exercise control was well, I'm not a
good person, so I have to go do these good things.
I have to go seek this redemptive you know, path
in order to get to a point where I don't
hate myself. But that was not going to happen. But
so I used shame to give myself the illusion of control.

(25:50):
That's fascinating. I actually haven't heard it described that way before.
So thank you there, you bet, Yeah, no problem. I'm
just going to use your really harrowing experience to you know,
further further my brain. It's okay, I mean, I mean,
I think it's fascinating too. Like once you get to
the point where you start to heal, as I did,

(26:11):
you can a little bit step back and be like,
oh wow, the brain is fascinating. And it really is.
And therapy for me was a lot like going to
graduate school, but it was just a graduate program in
my brain. Hey, before we get back to the show,

(26:32):
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(26:55):
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(27:17):
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(27:38):
One of the things that I was thinking about as
you were describing the attention to detail and the control
that you needed in order to have, you know, a
moment of feeling safe and settled right super high cost there,
because you get everything into place and then one thing
is crooked and then your concept of safety is out
the fucking window. But that everything that you describe made

(27:59):
perfect sense while you were deployed right knowing where your
exits were, knowing where who was in the room with you,
knowing how fast and like how far away the vehicle
was if you needed to escape, making sure that you
were in the right state of mind in order to
take a life with that was what the task was
ahead of you. Like all of that stuff makes perfect
sense in that situation. But coming back into a world

(28:23):
where that is not the backdrop, where that is not
the actual situation, it's really hard to reprogram what is safe, right,
Like you can't know what you knew before. And that's
exactly what I felt. I felt like I knew things
other people didn't, and I had seen things other people hadn't.
And it wasn't like I felt like, oh, because I've

(28:43):
seen Afghanistan. It was I think what I felt was
more like, I've seen that the world is dangerous and
and so, you know, hypervigilance kept me alive in Afghanistan,
and my brain did not for years fully accept the
idea that I was safe. And you know, I don't
know if I fully accept that idea now, but I

(29:04):
much more often do. And this an analogy I didn't
use in the book but that I've kind of dragged
out lately that I like, I'm not a big golfer,
like I played golf like once a year, but I
know enough to you know, put this analogy together, which
is that you know, like when you are playing like
a really serious golf course, like you know, eighteen holes

(29:24):
with par fives and everything, you got your golf bag
and it's got it's got like nine, ten, twelve clubs
in it, right, You've got different clubs for all sorts
of different situations. And then like me, when I play
golf once a year with my buddies, I play this
little part three course that's like for amateurs. And when
you know, when we go play that course, like I
bring like five clubs, I mean, like a putter, and

(29:45):
like you know, I almost don't even bring a bag, right,
you don't need much. Well in a lot of ways,
that first course that's like your regular life. That's your emotions.
Like you need to reach into your bag and pull
out nuanced emotions, empathy, you know this if you need
for parenting, good lord, Like there's so much patience, all
sorts of things, happiness, you know, contentedness, all this different stuff.

(30:08):
But the part three that's like combat zone, right, which
is like you're not going to bring all that other
stuff because that stuff is just gonna slow you down.
It's gonna make it take longer. It's heavy. Well in
a combat zone, like you're not gonna use empathy very often,
you're not gonna use happiness, Like that stuff is gonna
get you killed. You pull out the wrong club and
like all of a sudden, you're not ready for the threat.

(30:30):
Well then you come home and all of a sudden,
you're playing on the big course again. But you haven't
used any of these other clubs in a while, and
in fact, you got to the point where you kind
of pushed your memory of those clubs out because they
were unhelpful. And now you're trying to play on this
course with clubs you haven't used in a long time,
and they may not be in your bag anymore. And
that's that, to me, is what the experience of coming

(30:51):
home from the deployment in a lot of ways was like.
Although I didn't realize it, it's just like I'm supposed
to use all these other emotions now, but they're barely
in my bag. And frankly, I'm much more comfortable with
these other emotions. I'm much better with my seven iron
because I can use it on nearly every hole. Like
I think, I'm just going to try that for this
and and that that's the that's the stuff that makes

(31:12):
somebody like me do what I did, which is volunteered
to try to go back, which they didn't let me do.
But like because it's like, well, that world makes sense,
the part three makes sense to me. Yeah, is that?
Do you think that's really common with that's who have
come back from deployment, that they're like, I don't get
these big courses. Let me go back to the place
that I know, even though that even though it was

(31:33):
really dangerous and really violent. Yeah, I do. I do
think so. I mean, I think it's I think it's
a part of why vets are like we tend to
be so comfortable around other vets because there's like a shorthand,
you know. But like the movie The hurt Locker, there's
a lot of things that doesn't get right. But the
scenes where Jeremy Renner is home and he's sort of

(31:53):
h he's not able to be present and he's emotionally numb.
Those are pretty right on, because that we're after what
it just doesn't make sense to you. It's very hard
to describe what it is to have every faculty available
to you fully utilized, right, I mean, that's that's what

(32:14):
it is to be in a combat zone, like to
take everything you have and bring it to bear because
you have to. There's an addictive quality to that. I
think you know, having had zero experiences like that, but
when you say it's an addictive quality, like it reminds
me of you know, what do we use substances for.
We use them because they're very quick solutions and we
get that hit of I know this, I'm in the

(32:35):
right place, or these things are numbed out or or whatever,
and that going back to a place where you made
sense in the world, even though that world was bat shit.
There's something very comforting about that. And go ahead, oh,
I was gonna say, and easy to understand. Yeah, And
for me, like I didn't turn to substance, but that's

(32:59):
because and I try and be really clear in the
book that like that's not a judgment anyone who did.
Perhaps I would have what I had in front of me.
What I had available to me was a career in
politics that afforded me the opportunity to chase these endorphin highs,
to go after that level of adrenaline, not that level,
but something approaching it, and that became my drug, That
became my self medication. Had I not had that available

(33:21):
to me, entirely possible that I would have chosen something else. Yeah,
And I think we have this sort of idea that
veterans who do become addicts of any source or any
source I guess is a decent enough way to say that,
but that they're they're failing in some way, and of

(33:41):
course that doubles back on that internalized shame and I
shouldn't be affected by this. It just it seems like
that whole this is way oversimplifying things. But I kind
of wonder, like going back to what you had written about,
like you know, you part of training is that you
get this, what you're doing is no big deal. Other
people have it worse, And if there was an exit

(34:06):
process that kind of acknowledged that that what happened was
really intense and really crazy, and like it gave you
that validation, Like it seems like a really simple answer,
and of course it's not simple. But I wonder what
would happen if that? How? How would it how? What
do you think take me into that? Because one of

(34:28):
the things about the military is you learn all sorts
of different tools and skills, like so many different tools
and skills. I talked about it a little in the
first part of the book where I talked about all
of a sudden I had all these you know, all
these new skill sets that I didn't expect, like how
to walk on dead leaves without making noise. I mean,
and you take it face value that you are learning
this trade. Now. Some of those also are things like

(34:51):
what the sexual harassment policy is, what the you know
all this different you know what what it means to
make sure that you're not exercising any sort of racial
discrimination in your promoting. Like you you also learn all
these professional skills, and so if on the way out
you were just you understood that one of your jobs
on the way out was to sit for briefings on
how PTSD works, you would understand, oh, I'm being equipped

(35:14):
to be able to see this in myself. The same
way that when you go through basic training one of
the things they teach you is how to spot heat
stroke and how to make sure that you and your
soldiers are properly hydrated. Right, Like, these are these are
skills about turring for yourself and your fellow service members.
So there's two things that need to happen. One on
the way out, you need to be equipped with this
knowledge so that you can spot it in yourself and

(35:35):
your fellow veterans. But frankly on the way in, like,
there should be a half of a day during basic
training where they teach you what PTSD is and what
it looks like and what it feels like, the same
way that they taught us how much water we need
to drink and how often we need to drink it,
and how to spot heat stroke or dehydration in our

(35:59):
fellow soldiers. Like it shouldn't be treated any differently, and
if we did, a lot of lives should be saved
just by virtue of that knowledge. That would be amazing.
I mean that sounds magical. This is the way that
we want to deal with the realities of being humans
and difficult situations, Like we want to be informed just
the same way we are with heat stroke and dehydration

(36:20):
and all of these things. It's all in the body.
It's it's not any different. I mean, they taught me
how to treat a sucking chest wound, but they but, yeah,
what you're going to use every day. But they didn't
teach me what my nightmares might mean, right, I mean,
so like to me, it's not even a revolutionary idea.
It's just like added to the list of injuries that
we need to be able to spot. Yeah, I wonder

(36:43):
if that happened. Like, let's say that at the end
of your deployment you have an exit debriefing where they
talk about the signs and symptoms of PTSD, what it
might be like when you come home. Here are some
things you might experience. These are all normal given what
you went through. Do you think that people would still
have the yeah, yeah, yeah, that might happen to somebody

(37:04):
else who was in more danger. Would we still do
that sort of internal opting out? You're always going to
have some of that, Like every every veteran, every person
is going to have that voice in their head that
tells them that. But it dims the voice a little bit,
you know, And that's the key is it just makes
it more likely that it gives you a greater chance

(37:25):
of being able to rebut that voice and say I
think you might be wrong. I think I should I
should go look into this and look, it's not gonna
work for everybody, but it's going to work for a
lot of people. Yeah, And that would be incredible though,
if as part of your debriefing, you were told here's
what's going to happen, right, Like, if you start noticing
some of these symptoms and nightmares and hyper vigilance and

(37:46):
things that made sense where you're deployed but don't really
make sense back home, and the other thing that will
happen is you'll think that it doesn't apply to you
because what you went through wasn't so bad. I mean,
maybe I'm cynical, but I can you picture a day
where the military actually comes back and says, hey, by
the way, we know we told you that you have

(38:09):
to sort of go into this channel of your brain
in order to do what you did and say that
it's no big deal, but honestly it was a big deal.
Like can that ever happen? Yeah? Because if you think,
I think about all the things that people wouldn't have
been able to picture of the military doing right. I
mean like that's like you wouldn't have been able to
several years ago. The idea of one of the first

(38:29):
briefings you get in basic training is like, hey, here's
you don't ask, don't tell, it's gone. Here's the policy.
We don't have one, right, I mean like that back
then it was like people would have been like, no,
that's never gonna happen, you know. And before that, it
was like, well, there's not going to be a time
when women serving in primarily combat roles. And before that
it was well, we're not going to have black troops

(38:50):
and white troops together, you know. And and the thing
is is that every time you make one of these changes,
people think it's going to be a huge deal, and
then the very first Basic training class that goes through it,
that's the only army they've ever known. They don't know
a difference, right. And that's why I'm so big on
the idea of not just doing this when people are leaving,
but doing it when they're coming in. Because when you

(39:11):
are leaving, like when you get back from a deployment
or even if you've decided you're getting out of the service,
and you're like a short time, or you've got a
few weeks ago, you are ready for the next part.
You are ready to go home, you're ready to do whatever.
So like you're not necessarily that clued in. You know,
you're You're a lot more likely to be like, man,
I gotta go get an apartment, I gotta go get

(39:31):
a job. Like you're focused on that stuff, which is
why I think it's really important to sandwich it and
to have these briefings on the way in as well.
That's a really good point, Like when you are done,
you are done and you just want to go home, Yeah,
because they have some stuff they have like they'll do
now some things where they'll ask some questions of you,
like hey, have you experienced this or this or this?
So they'll give you a form to fill out. And

(39:52):
I've just talked to a lot of guys who are like, yeah,
like every other form I had, I just checked no, no, no,
because I was I didn't want to stick around. Yeah,
you don't want to open cantiforms just when you're like
one step from the finish line in there, so you
know it would be interesting to do and maybe this
already exists, but to to have sort of a drip
campaign is what we would call it in the in
the business world of you know, you you just got

(40:14):
home and here's this packet of information that shows up
that talks to you about the realities of PTSD and
internalized not that bad is UM and all of these
things and sort of that that safety net, that continuum
of care, and it should be sent to family members.
I mean, it should be sent to the people who
are going to be around you and who can you know,
spot it. And there are some movements to do some

(40:35):
things that the Army now has a program where they
will train troops to be what they call master resilience trainers.
Now what they don't have our I think that there's
very few people who that's their full time job in
the military. There it's more of a thing where it's like,
you know, you do this also you're the unit's master
resilience trainer, you know. And it's which is the same
as like you are the units voting officer. Your job

(40:57):
is to coordinate if people want to get their absentee
BA from their home state, like it's you know, in
your off time, you know. So there are some things happening,
but I also know that we haven't made enough progress.
There was a day during the first part of the
book tour, I was in d C in a hotel,
staying in a hotel, and I was checking in. I
was talking to the clerk and I think I had
on like an army shirt or something, and so she

(41:18):
started talking to me about it. Turned out she had
just completed basic training and was in the Army National Guard,
and I was telling her, you know, about the book,
and she she was like, Oh, I'd be really interested.
I can't wait to read it because I just went
through basic training and so I'm I learned a lot
about PTSD and I was like really excited. I was like, oh, wow,
like are they was there like a unit of instruction

(41:39):
on it now? And she goes, oh, no, No, they
didn't instruct us at all. But all of my drill
instructors were combat veterans and I just watched them and
they obviously have PTSD and it was like and I
was just like, Okay, so we haven't made really any
progress as far as that goes. Maybe not in the military,
but that is that's really interesting. One of the things
that I've I've talked about with a lot of guests

(41:59):
this season is like where does where is your optimism
and where is your hope? And for a lot of
guests are like, check out the younger generations, right, I
mean every generation builds on the one before, right, Like
what was taboo? And one generation is the fight of
the next generation. And you know, in in my generation,

(42:19):
it was new to talk about sexual abuse in childhood, right,
Like it was new to be brave enough to come
out and talk about those things. And not that those
issues have gone away, but the next generation sort of
took that as Yeah, this is a normal thing that
we talk about, and so each one has different normal things.
And we've spent so much time sort of normalizing conversations

(42:41):
around mental health for somebody to go into basic training
and be like, I actually recognize the signs of PPST
in my instructors, even if they're not saying it. So
that's like, that's a really like optimistic and hopeful thing.
And I wonder, I wonder how much that will trickle up.
I think it does. And the way I always think
about this is I've gotten a lot of affirmation from

(43:03):
the world about my being public about this, Right, Um,
I didn't know that was gonna happen when I did it.
But it's been one of the better parts of it
is that every time I write about this or speak
about it, I know that it causes people who need
to get help to get help, or it helps people
who are who who loves someone who needs help or
got help to understand them better or help them get help.

(43:25):
And and so I know it, I know it happens.
I've had the great privilege of having people tell me like,
I listened to you do this interview and it saved
my life, Like there's nothing like that. It's amazing, And
I wish everybody got that kind of affirmation for getting help.
But what I try to remind everybody of is that
we all live public lives to some degree. You don't
have to have a huge social media following or a

(43:48):
public profile or whatever. Like you don't even need a
social media account. Like if you have six coworkers and
you go to therapy and you tell your six co workers,
there's a very high probability that you just gave one
of your six coworkers a permission slip to go get
help and it might save their life. And so in
the same way that tragically suicide can be contagious because

(44:13):
you know, when people hear about it, it tends to
sort of creep into the consciousness. Getting help can be
contagious too. Yeah, there's something really liberating about hearing somebody
else tell the story of something that you have been
secretly wrestling with. Right. There is a real permission giving
in there, and that's part of being seen, right. I

(44:34):
mean what we've been talking about this entire time is
the power and the necessity of being seen. Yeah. Absolutely.
I mean that's what I hear so often from people,
is that people say to me, like I realized, like
if you needed help, then maybe it's okay that I
need help, you know. Yeah. And I mean we've got
such a long, long history and so many sectors of

(44:56):
being human, of being terrified of being seen. Right, that's
just a really honerable, vulnerable place to be. Yeah, And
that that goes back to something we were talking about earlier,
where like you have to make it safe to be seen.
You have to start building building spaces where it is
safe to tell the truth about your own experience. Yeah,
because everybody is completely fucked up. Like that's that's what's

(45:18):
actually happening out here, is like one of the things
that you learn when you tell the world that you're
fucked up, and that particularly if you tell the world
that you were at one point suicidal, you become a
place where nobody feels judged, and everybody can tell you
about their own ship. And you quickly learned like everybody's damaged,
Like there's no exceptions. Nobody gets out of this alive.

(45:41):
And as a result, like for me, like it makes
me feel more comfortable talking about my stuff because I know,
like everybody's dealing with stuff, and then you feel less alone,
you know, And it goes back to the idea of
the difficulty of like for veterans of being in a
generation where so few people have served, it's that sense
of being alone own. But then for the larger population,

(46:02):
it's just the more we realize that there's no amount
of money, no amount of fame, no amount of family,
no matter of anything that can cure this stuff, that
ultimately you've got to go straight to the source of
the trauma and deal with it. And when you realize
that you're not the only one who has to do that,
I think it helps. I wonder how that butts up

(46:22):
against our sort of pop culture good vibes. Only have gratitude,
think about the good times, stay positive. Like, to me,
that is the antithesis of being seen in your truth
and having safe places to be vulnerable. How do you
see those two sort of opposing forces. Yeah, in two ways. One,

(46:43):
you know, Instagram makes everybody famous in some way or another, right,
like it's every you know, you may have fifty followers,
but you are Instagram and all these other platforms. They
sort of coax you into presenting a certain persona, and
then you try and live within that person own. And
when you're not feeling like you're living within that persona,
you feel like you're failing. Your friends appear to be

(47:04):
living within that persona, So what's wrong with you? That's problematic?
But then I actually think the other part has been
something that's been like ruminating for a long time in
our culture. And this is I always talking about this
as like the Top Gun example, which is to say,
you know, and I love the Top Gun movies. I've
seen Top Gun Maverick twice. Now, I saw the original
movie I don't know how many times. But like I'm

(47:26):
forty one years old, so I grew up in the
eighties and nineties, and that means I grew up on
these action movies like Top Gun, where the narrative is
pretty simple. Something really bad happens to the main character.
The main character overcomes this through a singular act of
redemptive heroism. Okay, so like in Top Gun, Goose dies

(47:46):
and two scenes later, Maverick kills a couple of bad
guys over the Indian Ocean and then boom, he's good
to go. He throws gooses dog tags off the deck
and he gets the girl. And what that taught at
least my generation, is you overcome trauma through singular acts
of redemptive heroism. It's not through therapy, it's not through

(48:07):
hard work, it's not it's through acts of redemptive heroism.
So for me, I was running for office for a
lot of right reasons, but I also recognized that the
breakneck pace at which I was doing it and what
I was putting myself through was my constantly seeking an
active redemptive heroism to feel like I was worthy of these,

(48:27):
you know, superlatives that people were bestowing upon me when
I There were people who were in Afghanistan when I
got there, who were still there when I left, and
there were people who didn't make it through the Wranter,
and I felt like the only way I was ever
going to overcome the way I was feeling is if
I basically saved the world. And the truth was like
that was a mirage that was constantly in the distance,

(48:49):
but what was real was recovery and post traumatic growth,
and that was something I could actually achieve. But it
took me a long time to realize that. Yeah, and
it takes overcoming that that urged to redeem what's wrong right,
because the actual medicine, the actual healing, is in not
really redemption, it's in stating the truth. The truth is

(49:11):
is that if you if you had a sequel of
what happened immediately after the first Top Gun movie, it
would be Maverick wondering why the hell he doesn't feel better?
He killed two bad guys? Why am I still feeling
responsible for Gruce's death every day? Why why can't I concentrate?
Why can't I be present with my family? And the
answer is, Maverick, you need therapy now. The reason that

(49:34):
they never made that sequel, I assume, is because Tom
Cruise is a scientologist who doesn't believe in therapy, which
is a shame because the movies are great. Otherwise I
would actually see a sequel like that. Like, I am
not a movie fan these days because I think they're
all just the same story over and over again. But
like that, I think of the power of that storytelling.
I am often sort of bitching to my team about

(49:58):
like every time I the a tired old trope about
grief or healing or trauma or whatever that has that
sort of one single event that you do you look
on the bright side, or you start a foundation and
then the sun comes out and the birds sing and
you get a new puppy. Like I understand what they're
going for with that narrative art. They're looking for emotional impact,

(50:19):
so you keep coming back. But you know what has
emotional impact, The fucking truth. Yeah, the credits don't roll
in real life. They do not. But I think, like
I think in some ways, and maybe it's not conscious thought,
but I really feel like we're all craving a story
that looks like us yea, and that that is a
much more powerful narrative than these redemptive tropes that we

(50:42):
keep feeding ourselves. Well, And so then what happens in
poppyir culture that's really damaging with PTSD is what we
get instead when we actually depict PTSD is what I
call PTSD porn, which is basic voyeurism of people in
an out of control phase of untreated, un diagnosed on
acknowledge PTSD. And that's when you get stuff like, you know,

(51:03):
it's a veteran robbing a bank after shooting up you know,
some sort of drug after beating their spouse, and then
when we come to lawn and then they kill themselves.
And so what do we all learn from that, including
those of us who might have undiagnosed PTSD at that time, is, Oh,
what we learned is PTSD means I'm going to be
potentially violent. But what it definitely means is it's a

(51:23):
terminal diagnosis. It's going to end my career and in
my life. Well then why would anybody go get diagnosed
with it? Right? But what's actually going on around us
is that veterans and non veterans alike are getting treated
for PTSD every day, and they're getting better, and they're
getting to a point where it doesn't in any way
hinder their life or keep them from doing anything they

(51:44):
want to do. They can manage it. Because they've reached
post traumatic growth, and we don't tell that story. The
only two places in popular culture where I have seen
that story told are two very small places. One there's
a little show called Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which
is a tiny little piece in the Marvel universe where
the Winter Soldier goes to therapy for his PTSD, and

(52:05):
I think so does the Falcon character, and it's a
bit of a part of the show. And then the
other place was there was a West Wing episode where
Bradley Whitford's character Josh Lyman, after he gets shot, he
has to go to a therapy session because he has
PTSD because he put his hand through a window. Now,
the problem with both of those is that they resolved
them because their TV shows they have to resolve them

(52:25):
very quickly, so it's not altogether accurate, but it does
have the benefit of in both cases they do present
examples of post traumatic growth. I was pretty deep into
therapy before I even found out from my therapist that
post traumatic growth was a real thing, and in fact,
the majority of people who went through the program I
went through actually achieved it. I didn't even know that.

(52:47):
I thought I was the exception because I was getting
better and I felt bad about it. So you know,
on the one hand, we've done a good job of
getting across to two veterans in particular that getting help
is not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength.
I think people get that at this point. But what
we have to further get across is that actually getting
help works and it does help, you'll get better. That

(53:08):
will encourage people to do it. And then the last
part of this is we have to no longer make
it where the only people are Society really accepts and
permits to get help our veterans, because there's so many
people with trauma out there, and we give permission to
veterans like I mean, it's I can tell you from
first same experience that it turns out me going out

(53:30):
and saying I have PTSD. It's I mean, honestly, I
think there's people who like me more, which is an
interesting thing. But if you are a woman who has
been a victim of domestic or sexual violence, that's not
the experience, but it should be the exact same experience.
And so that's where we have to get to. Yeah,
everybody having the right to be seen in their pain
and know that getting support is valid and necessary and celebrated,

(53:58):
not rushed. Right. I think that that phrase post traumatic
growth is often sort of weaponized as like, yeah, yeah,
stop being affected by all of this, like get to
your growth stage. Like that's really like short, short fuse
we have while we're waiting. Yeah. I had everybody with
a camera or a microphone in the country wanted to

(54:19):
interview me the day I announced that I had PTSD,
and I was like, I don't know anything about this.
You know, I've spent eleven years being wrong about it.
I'm not the one you want to interview. So that's
why I waited. Whatever. I think it had been seven
eight months before. I didn't interview because I wanted to
know what the heck I was talking about, and I
wanted to have actually gotten better. You've said that you

(54:40):
wrote Invisible Storm because it's the book you would have
wanted to read fourteen years ago. I love this because
there's a theme that's been happening in this season. Every
one of the authors that have come on the show
so far this season, they've all in a lot of
ways written their books for their former selves. It's like
this act of time travel, right, like restorative medicine. In

(55:03):
a way, writing a book like this is also about
the future, so to write like writing a story that
you can live into. But what do you hope people
see in your story or in your words even outside
of the book. What's your hope for the people who
hear you A couple of things. Number one, I want
people to know that post traumatic growth is real and
that it's achievable, it's worth pursuing. And the second, I

(55:27):
guess is that I want people to who who have
not had trauma to have a greater sense of what
it feels like to have trauma and really have repeated
the first thing, and to understand that post traumatic growth
is achievable, because what I think that contributes to is
fewer people feeling stigmatized by it because it's For instance,

(55:48):
you know, I've given a lot of interviews and I'm
often asked, you know, questions about the future and about
running for office. And when I'm asked whether I think
I could run for president or whatever, like I have
I have jack shipped zero interest in doing that. And
I don't just mean like right now, like I recognize
that one day I may develop that interest again, but
I it's not there right now, but that doesn't change

(56:10):
the fact that I always answer the question the same way.
I always say, yeah, I think I could be president.
I think it could be a really good one. And
a lot of times that gets read as I'm preserving
an opportunity for myself, But that's not what I'm doing.
What I'm doing is it comes from this place. It
comes from the place of I recognize that there are
people out there, whether they're combat veterans or veterans, or

(56:34):
victims of some sort of trauma or anything, who if
somebody is interviewing them for a job and is aware
that they've been through trauma or might even be aware
that they have PTSD, that's a factor for them. So
to me, it's important that I go out and I say, yeah,
I have PTSD and i'd be a very good president
and one day I might run for it. That's not

(56:54):
for me. That's because I don't ever want to contribute
to making it harder for anybody who's been or anything
to be able to pursue their own professional opportunities. And
I figure, if I make it clear that I think
I could be commander in chief, well then it's pretty
likely that if somebody accepts that idea, that somebody in
a position to hire somebody is not going to think

(57:14):
that their trauma is going to keep them from being
able to do that job. Yeah, you're laying the foundation
of what's possible for people who are carrying trauma, right
like that You're not You're not this broken, irredeemable vessel
that like you can actually do whatever you'd like. Right. Yeah,
it's an injury. It's an injury like any other. I

(57:36):
before I could go into the Army, I had to
have surgery and physical therapy on my knee, and it
it hurts sometimes when I run. But like I play
on an over thirty would bet baseball team in in
the men's Adult Baseball League. We're very serious about it.
We just I will brag that we just won the
championship here in Kansas City. Yeah. I play with guys

(57:57):
who played in college. I play with guys who played
in the pros, and I'm I'm the fastest guy on
my team. And after the game, I ice my knee
and I usually do it twice because I have to
for the next day my knee is going to be huge. Well.
PTSD is the same way it doesn't keep me from
doing anything, but I know that I have that injury,
and so there are things I have to do in

(58:19):
order to manage that injury, just the same way I
gotta ice my knee after I run. There really truly
is no difference. And the way that we wouldn't push
somebody through a knee injury after surgery like same thing, right,
like leaving space for the body and the mind and
the heart to do what they need to do. Well,
what I did for eleven years with my brain is

(58:40):
the equivalent of pushing somebody to just keep going without
getting surgery and physical therapy. At the end of that
your leg would be mangled. It would be so much
worse than it was with the initial injury. That's what
happened in my brain. My initial trauma was not as
severe as some other people's, but then I spent eleven
years ignoring it, and so then it was mess and
then I had to go back and fix it. I
love that analogy because I know, you know again, my

(59:02):
field is grief, and very often grief related to an
untimely death of some kind, and this push that people
get to get over it quickly, get right back out
there go do this thing. It's like it is the
equivalent of what you just described, Like you just came
out of knee reconstruction surgery. You're still in the recovery room,
but people are making you get up and take a lap,

(59:25):
like you just can't do that well, particularly if you're
comparing your trauma to others. That's like you just got
out of knee reconstruction surgery and you look and the
guy in the bed next to you, or the gall
in the bed next to you just got out of
knee amputation surgery. And so then you say to yourself, well,
I've got no excuse I should walk out of here.
You know, if you do that, your knee is gonna
get a lot worse. So you you've got to take

(59:46):
your injury seriously and comparing it to somebody else's like
injury is not going to make a difference in your injury. Yeah,
And we do that so often in so many ways.
It's like, gosh, like the deck is so stacked against
in a lot, like so stacked against the kind of
validation and care you've been describing, right from culture and

(01:00:06):
gender and military and lack of information and internalized like ah,
but there is actually a very simple, not easy, but
a very simple and clear path forward, and it is
telling the truth and priming people, those at the center
of the trauma and those surrounding that person, priming them

(01:00:29):
to tell the truth and to create spaces in which
other people can tell the truth. Yeah, because I wasted
a lot of time comparing my trauma to other people's,
and it took me therapy to learn that other people's
drama is irrelevant. There's somebody listening to this right now
who needs to get help, but he's saying to themselves
like I didn't, I didn't go to Afghanistan. And my

(01:00:52):
point is, what the hell does that have to do
with anything? Like my my brain doesn't know what your
brain went through, and your brain doesn't know what mine
went through, and they don't care. I think it's not relevant.
I think this is a good segue here. I want
to help us wind down a little bit, but I
would love to have you described the Veterans Community Project
a little bit and how that fits into what we've

(01:01:12):
been talking about in regards to validation and connection and
overcoming that internalized shame. Yeah, I really appreciate the question.
Thank you. In fact, all of my royalties from Invisible
Storm go to Veterans Community Project, um so Veterans Community Project.
I'll first tell the story of how I got involved.
So October one, I think it was of twenty eighteen

(01:01:34):
is when I first went to the v A to
get help. I found out that like it was gonna
take months for me to to get in there, and
I was I had literally already written the letter for
the next day that said, I'm dropping out a public life.
You go to the VIA to get help. Well, six
weeks before that, I was running from mayor of Kansas
City and the campaign was going well, we were gonna win,
but I was not having any kind of good time.

(01:01:55):
And I toured Veterans Community Project and I was blown
away by the place. What it is is is it
is a combination of two things. It's an outreach operation
that lowers the barrier for any veteran to get any
help of any kind by using services that are available
in the community, which makes a huge difference in the
suicide epidemic. Because a lot of people are familiar with
the figure that twenty two veterans a day on average

(01:02:17):
take their lives, what fewer people know is that on average,
out of that twenty two, sixteen of them are not
connected to any type of veteran specific services of any
kind at the time that that happens. So by lowering
the barrier dramatically and saying any veteran qualifies for a
percent of the services, when now you're bringing a lot
more people into the door, and you're getting a lot
more people help the other thing. And what what VCP

(01:02:38):
is much better known for is raising villages for anybody
who raised a hand, which is to say, creating villages
of tiny houses with wrap around case management services to
serve homeless veterans and transition them back into being permanently
housed and fully functioning members of society. And does this
as an astronomical success rate that really no other transitional

(01:03:00):
listness world can claim. And I was just blown away
by a place that tour did. It felt like a
cross between you know, afford operating based in Afghanistan and
a startup in Silicon Valley, Like it just felt like home.
And it's the best civilian job I've ever had. And
if people want to support it, which I hope they will,
they can go to VCP like Veterans Community Project dot
org and it's greatly appreciated. What I understood learning about

(01:03:24):
the project and how it's different than other attempts to
house homeless veterans is you're you're basically what was the
phrase there was something like recreated the last stable and
successful living experience. Yeah, it's It's one of the coolest
parts about it is that if you walk into one
of our under one of our village campuses, it looks

(01:03:44):
and feels a lot like active duty housing. And what
we do is we put people back into the last
place in their life they were stable and successful, and
we reignite that dignity within them. And then the other
thing we do is we restart the military to civilian
transition back at day one. If you think about the
experience of coming of going into and then coming out
of the military. Let's say you went into the military

(01:04:05):
right at high school, and four years later, maybe you've
been to war, maybe you've just been through other stressful things,
whatever it is, you come out and you're dumped back
out into the world, and in that four years, like
you pretty much almost never had to worry about where
you're where, your lunch, your dinner, your breakfast is gonna
come from. You didn't really have to pay rent from
probably any of that time unless you chose to move

(01:04:25):
off post. You never got a cable bill, you didn't
have to sign up for insurance. And if you layer
on top of that some degree of trauma and disruption
in your life just by serving in the military, and
now you're dumped out of the world with there's nobody
around you with a shared experience, like we talked about,
it's really disorienting and after a period of time you
can have real struggles and that's how people end up

(01:04:46):
dealing with things like homelessness. And by the way, also
while you were on active duty, everything you needed was
usually at one building, maybe two. It was like where
you got your hair cut was the same building. You
went to the bank and got groceries in right, And
now you're supposed to navigate this whole world in addition
to go find employment and meaning in your life, and
it can trip up a lot of people. So even

(01:05:07):
if you've been on the street for twenty years, we
restart that transition over. We put you in the village
with other people who have shared experience. You have a
case manager who's your case manager. Our case managers don't
have more than ten clients apiece, which is super low,
and they have time to spend with you. And over
the course of time that you're there, you transition from
receiving all your services at our community center on campus

(01:05:29):
to by the time you're ready to leave, you're going
into the community to go to your job, to go
to the dentist, to go to whatever else you gotta
go to. Just like everybody else. You just happen to
live in a tiny house in our village, and you're
completely ready to move out and be successful in civilian life,
which is amazing, right because like the normal experiences, like
you're you know, you're a fish and you're over here

(01:05:51):
in this fish bowl and we're just gonna like pick
you out of that fish bowl and toss you into
a completely new one and expect you to land on
your feet. Well, fish don't have feet, but you know
what I mean. Well, look at my example, right, Like
I could not have been in a better situation. I
came out of my deployment, went back to a job
at a white shoe law firm where I was using
my Georgetown law degree. Came from a family that was
fifth generation in Kansas City, ended up with a very

(01:06:13):
successful professional career. But you know what happened. A few
months after I got back, a partner walks into my
office and it's like, hey, this memo whatever it is
I was writing, is super important, And I was like,
is anybody gonna die? And like we both knew that,
like I probably weren't gonna work there very long, Like
I mean, and that's that was just my experience. Like,

(01:06:33):
so the experience of going back into civilian life is
a it's a treacherous one, and so sometimes it's important
to just started over again. Yeah, it's a it's a
transition that deserves a lot of respect and care and
education and continuity, right, respecting what the reality is, right,
like the dissonance of that and starting there. It's what

(01:06:55):
you were talking about with like your dream for how
we talk about PTSD, like on the way in and
on the way out. So the Veteran's Community Project is
a way of creating that dream right where you're you're
exiting the military now, and we want to talk to
you about what it might be like and what you
might experience and really really reflecting that whatever you're going

(01:07:18):
through is not a reflection of your character. It's a
reflection that we that we can predict and understand based
on whatever you've gone through. And part of that is
putting you in a literal community of tiny houses of
people who are going through the exact same ship that
you are. That's right. Community and connection is everything, it
really really is. Thank you for this opportunity to talk

(01:07:40):
to you about it. I really enjoyed the conversation me too.
Such an honor to talk about this stuff with you.
We're going to link obviously to your book and to
the Veteran's Community Project in the show notes. Anywhere else
you want people to find you where they can go
for more information, Sure, you can find me on Twitter
and Instagram at Jason Candor. And then also I have
a podcast. It's called The Majority fifty four. It's about politics,

(01:08:04):
so it's very different than all of this. But you know,
if you're a if you're progressive politically, or even if
you're not, and you liked anything I need to say,
you might want to check that out. Awesome, So we
will link to all of that in show notes. So
stay tuned, friends, we will be right back with your
questions after this break. Each week I leave you with

(01:08:30):
some questions to carry with you until we meet again. Now,
this season has a running theme, which is obvious in
some episodes more than others. But this season is all
about hope, finding it, losing it, redefining it, fighting for
it in these weird personal and collective times. Now, this time,

(01:08:51):
I didn't directly ask Jason what hope looks like for him,
but I personally found a lot of hope in our
conversation together. Remember that part where Jason put forth his
vision of how the military might educate people on PTSD
on the way in at basic training and on the
way out, and I was like, that is not gonna happen. Like,
have you met the military? Do you remember what he

(01:09:12):
said to me? He reminded me that we've done lots
of things that seemed impossible at the time. Over the years,
the military, well, it is definitely not a kind or
unproblematic space by any stretch. The military has actually grown
to address multiple issues. Change is possible. And his description

(01:09:34):
of the Veterans Community Project gave me a lot of
hope and really underscored something that I believe in so deeply,
that allowing people the truth of their own experience starting
from there and finding connection there, seeing people for who
they are, and meeting inside that reality. Like that stuff

(01:09:55):
really can change the world. Being seen and respected for
the reality of what you've lived. I mean, I think, honestly,
that is the only medicine we have. What's stuck with
you today from this conversation? What parts made you think

(01:10:19):
or reflect or feel just the tiniest bit better about
what you're living with? What made you curious to find
out more. Everybody's going to take something different from today's show,
but I do hope you found something to hold onto.
Conversations like this are happening more and more out there
in the world. Did today's show give you any starting

(01:10:41):
points for your own conversations about difficult things? Let me
know I want to hear about it. Check out Refuge
in Grief on Instagram or here after Pod on TikTok
to see video clips from the show and leave your
thoughts in the comments on those posts. That's a great
way to get in touch, and be sure to tag
us in your convert stations starting posts on your own

(01:11:01):
social accounts. Use the hashtag here after Pod on all
the platforms. We love to see where this show takes
you using that hashtag. Let's just find what you're talking
about mm hmm. If you want to tell us how
today's show felt for you, or you have a request
or a question for upcoming explorations of difficult things, give

(01:11:22):
us a call at three to three six four three
three seven six eight and leave a voicemail. If you
missed it, you can find the number in the show
notes or visit Megan divine dot c O. If you'd
rather send an email, you can do that too, right
from the website. Megan Divine dot c O. We want
to hear from you. I want to hear from you.

(01:11:43):
This show, this world needs your voice. Together, we can
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They're going to see the show description for hereafter and think,
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(01:12:04):
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(01:12:25):
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(01:12:47):
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(01:13:09):
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Amy Brown, co produced by Elizbeth Fossio with logistical and

(01:13:31):
social media support from Micah. Edited by Houston Tilly, music
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fidgeting in my chair because I can't keep still

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Other People Have It Worse: Veteran Jason Kander on PTSD & recognizing you need help