July 30, 2024 • 58 mins
Welcome back to Project Sapient! In this special episode, we are honored to have Dr. Kate Pate, PhD neurophysiologist, coach, and entrepreneur, as our first in-person guest. Dr. Pate shares her extensive experience in scientific research and practical applications in the military and special operations community, focusing on critical topics such as traumatic brain injury (TBI), stress, and trauma.
Dr. Pate discusses her journey from academia to founding Karuna Medical, where she develops innovative medical devices for austere environments. She also delves into her work on transformational recovery, psychedelic integration, and functional medicine, all aimed at helping service members and veterans with complex health issues.
The conversation explores the neurophysiological science behind stress and trauma, the concept of allostatic load, and the importance of resilience training for first responders and military personnel. Dr. Pate emphasizes the significance of self-care and offers valuable advice for those in high-stress professions.
Join us for an insightful discussion that sheds light on the challenges faced by law enforcement and military communities and the steps we can take to support their mental and physical well-being.
Stay safe and stay sapient!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Project Sapient is a podcast meant to engage our brothers and sisters in the
law enforcement and military communities in conversations we all know we need to have.
All opinions you'll hear are our own, are protected by our First Amendment of
the United States Constitution, and in no way reflect or are meant to reflect
the opinion of any specific agency, officer, or service member.
(00:20):
Some opinions may be controversial.
Listener discretion is advised.
Music.
We'll be right back. All right, everyone. Project Sapien's back.
(00:44):
Jake's not with us today because technology. Just didn't decide or wanted to work with us today.
But it's actually a very special episode. Been trying for, feels like almost 10 years, Kate.
It's been a long time. Yeah, trying to get you on the show, and you just happened
to move into Boston, and I'm like, you know what?
(01:06):
Let's do it. Now we got to do it. Yeah, and in person. And in person, exactly.
So this is actually Project Sapiens' first in-person interview,
as you can tell with all the wires everywhere.
You've got an excellent setup here. So it's interesting, but I'm really excited, Kate, to get you on.
So I'm going to do a quick intro for those waiting to figure out who Kate is.
(01:30):
So here's a quick intro and bio about Kate. So Dr. Kate Pate, right?
Okay. You correct me. You're like, nope. Dr.
Kate Pate is a PhD neurophysiologist, coach, and entrepreneur with extensive
experience in scientific research and practical applications in the military and soft community.
(01:50):
Her doctoral work focused on respiratory neurophysiology, exploring the brain-breath-body
connection, and later expanded to include trauma-informed yoga and meditation for the military.
Cate's postdoctoral research centered on redox biology related to inflammatory
diseases, including traumatic brain injury, a personal and professional interest
(02:14):
due to her own experiences with head injuries.
She transitioned from academia to industry, becoming a program director for
combat casualty care research, driven by her connection to the special operations community through her.
As the founder and CEO of Karuna Medical, she develops innovative medical devices
for austere environments with funding from the Department of Defense and the
(02:38):
National Institutes of Health.
Kate's passion for helping service members and veterans with complex health
issues led to her to pursue training in transformational recovery,
psychedelic integration, and functional medicine.
In addition to her medical work, Kate is dedicated to environmental conservation,
hunting, mountain sports, and helping the underserved.
(02:59):
She's pursuing a graduate degree in theology to further support the spiritual
health of those she helps. Like, wow.
You could have just said she works in the community or something.
No, no. Well, the thing is, though, you've done a lot, right?
And you do a lot for the veteran community.
(03:21):
And, you know, if you want to just kind of go into some of the work you've done,
especially with TBI and what you found over the years that you've been doing this.
I mean, just for context, I was in 2005 when I was in Iraq.
So for us, TBI was still foreign. It wasn't never even mentioned.
(03:42):
All of a sudden now, much later in years, they started talking about TBI.
So if you want to go over kind of how that all came about. Yeah,
well, and for folks from the earlier years and the GWAT years,
I mean, that wasn't talked about very often.
And so now it is an issue, right?
We're kind of, it's a known known at this point. So people are paying attention
(04:03):
when they're on active duty, when they get, or even in law enforcement,
the breacher community, people are paying attention now to when they might break.
You know, some eating some charges or whatever, you know, shooting a Gustav
or whatever it might be in whatever scenario or environment you're in.
But back then it was part of like the normal training, normal exposures and combat.
(04:24):
And so people weren't mentally tracking that stuff.
So you look back and you're like, well, I'm sure I was exposed to blast pretty
regularly, but I honestly don't remember because I wasn't mentally tracking
it at the time. It wasn't a known thing.
So for a lot of people from like the earlier years, I mean, I feel like for
many, they kind of assume, and probably rightly so, but then there's like an
(04:45):
unknown quantity or amount, you know?
And so it is really challenging for folks who have likely been exposed and maybe
greatly so, but just don't have the evidence for it because they weren't paying
attention at the time. It's a shame.
No, I mean, so my run-in with TBI first time ever was when I came home,
I decided, let me jump into college right away, you know? So jumped into college.
(05:10):
And at the, But before now, it's funny that the before and after when you learn about TBI.
So before, you know, GPA was like 3.5 and above.
And I was like one of them photographic memories. And I could just,
you know, like a parrot, you know, basically regurgitate whatever I read.
And when I came back home and then decided to jump right back into it,
(05:31):
my GPA dropped to like a 1.9.
I almost flunked out of college completely. And I was getting so pissed off
and frustrated, like, what the hell's wrong with me?
And that was really the first time where I...
Was like, you know what, I need to get checked, you know, see what the hell's
going on because this is not the norm.
Yeah. It wasn't for lack of effort. It was just like your brain isn't working
(05:54):
the way that it's used to and you can't focus and you're not retaining information.
And yeah, it's really, it's really challenging. And, and my kind of interest
in this or foray into TBI research really started when I was really young.
I loved brain and I was just a nerd. I I love brain stuff. I love neuroscience.
I used to read like neuroscience for dummies when I was like eight years old,
(06:15):
but I was really interested in that.
And then my, one of my older brothers got a really bad concussion from racing motocross.
And that was my first experience with anybody directly.
And I saw how it impacted him.
And I was really curious around that. And then as I got older,
I got really interested in various sports and horseback riding and mountain
(06:37):
biking, skiing, snowboarding.
And I started having my head injuries of my own, a number of them.
And some when I was younger didn't quite affect me so much, but I had a really
bad accident in 2016, mountain biking in New Zealand.
And I had a gnarly concussion, a bunch of sutures in my face.
And I was teaching at a medical school in Colorado at the time.
(06:58):
And trying to come back from that and teach, I was putting PowerPoints together
and it wasn't making sense to me.
And on. And I'm looking at these screens and I'm trying to remember what all of this means.
And I'm having to read a paragraph 10 times.
Just all of that was really frustrating.
So that was my direct experience with it. But at that time, I had already studied
(07:23):
TBI and so kind of knew what was happening and was trying to do all the right
things for myself to put things into place to recover well,
which at the time, it's like just because you have the knowledge doesn't mean
you're gonna do what you're supposed to do exactly i am guilty of that for sure but i had studied.
Backing up a few years, during my graduate work and into the postdoctoral years,
(07:46):
I had opportunities to study neurotrauma, spinal cord injury and traumatic brain injury.
And looking at, you mentioned redox biology, it was this balance of oxidants
and antioxidants in the body that can often contribute to inflammatory diseases, essentially.
Neurotrauma being one of these processes that involves inflammation that can go awry over time.
(08:09):
And we're really interested in looking at therapeutics to
kind of shut down the inappropriate inflammatory
response in that long-term part of you
know the the injury process yeah so that
was a lot of the work that i was doing as a postdoc was traumatic brain injury
and spinal cord injury work looking at different therapeutics to try to mitigate
(08:31):
these these inflammatory cascades that lead to long-term problems okay so because
we were doing drug discovery research we couldn't publish on anything because if you publish,
then you can't get a patent on, you know, the stuff.
So unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to present or publish on a lot of that
(08:51):
work, but there's a lot of promising data that came out of that work and that
those therapeutics were taken forth into cancer and radiation biology research
and they're in clinical trials now.
So Maybe at some point they could be used off-label for TBI research.
(09:11):
Maybe they could be used for a clinical trial.
Perhaps. I don't know if that's… Without trying to pry too much,
I get the whole patent thing.
Is it just because Big Pharma wouldn't want something like that?
Because you know how the VA is with their rainbow pills that they throw at veterans.
Is it something like, oh, that could hurt the Big Pharma industry? industry.
(09:35):
It's not so much that as much like as ultimately you would want,
I mean, I hate to say this, but ultimately you would kind of want like a big
pharma to pick it up because they're the ones who have the money to take it forward.
I mean, it's really difficult to do this work without deep pockets,
but they will never pick up a drug if it won't be profitable,
(09:57):
even if it could cure every disease on the planet.
It's like if they can't make money off it, they won't take it forward and
so to make money they have to have ip you know
intellectual property secured patents around it yeah
so for us developing a new therapeutic you want
to wait and get as long of a patent life
as possible so you kind of push off publishing for a while till you file your
(10:19):
patent gotcha and then once you file the patent you know you that the clock
starts ticking basically you've got to get to a point where you've got good
clinical data for somebody to come pick it up and take it forward. So it's a, it's a, it's.
Complex process. And it's really unfortunate that it works that way. Yeah.
That's, I mean, for, for the lay person, I say, I guess just,
(10:41):
you know, people like me,
just like, you know, so much red tape for, let's say an obvious answer,
you know, like, you know, instead of, you know, doing what you typically do,
a veteran comes home and then they go see the VA.
The VA says you have PTSD and TBI. That seemed to be like the go-to PTSD and TBI.
(11:02):
Here's a bunch of your pills and good luck. Yeah.
You know, like pretty much it as much, I mean, not to knock the VA too much.
I mean, they've, they've done great strides, but they're missing a lot of stuff
compared to when I first went to the VA back in 2008 is when I finally pulled
the trigger and went to the VA and it was an awful, awful experience.
(11:23):
And I walked away and then went back after a A friend of mine,
recent, more like in 2020, actually during COVID, oh, just before actually,
2019, he told me to definitely go back because it's completely changed compared to what we know it as.
And yeah, and I was impressed with some of the things that they're doing.
But again- Trying to think outside the box. Exactly. But it's a big behemoth,
(11:46):
you know? It's just difficult.
It's the bureaucracy of- It is. You know, of the whole thing. Yeah.
Kind of shifting gears, though, I know when me and you, we spoke a while ago
and how you, you know, from your work in the veteran community,
the soft community, you started seeing more first responders, right?
Law enforcement, firefighters, and you started kind of, I say,
(12:09):
like doing a correlation almost like, oh, shit, they pretty much have the same
issues, just different operating theaters, so to speak.
So can you go into like a little bit of what you've been noticing and working on? Yeah.
And I'll tie it back into the TBI stuff because that was really what led my
work there and then teaching at a medical school.
And then you described the kind of trajectory of my career and then working
(12:32):
for this combat casualty care research program.
It led me into the space of operational medicine, we'll just say.
Say and that obviously applications
for the military community but also applications for
first responder communities as well and going to
special operations medical association meetings and things like that i was starting
(12:53):
to see and meet lots of people from the first command first responder community
yeah and because they they were aware of the research that i had done in the
background tbi and some of the other things that i had done people in these communities that
I was crossing paths with, just started to open up a little bit.
They were like, okay, well, she's not associated with the unit that I'm a part of.
(13:17):
She's not a psychologist or a
mental health clinic. Like I'm not gonna be therapized when I talk to her.
People were like, okay, but I could talk to her about this. And so I think I
was kind of a safe space for people to just open up to naturally.
People would say stuff about TBI. Like I'm pretty sure I got,
blown up or I definitely did. And now I don't know what's going on, but I'm not okay.
(13:40):
And I don't really know where to go. I don't want to go through the traditional
channels for all the reasons you mentioned, but I don't want to get yanked from a team.
I don't, you know, there's all these, these barriers to seeking help.
And so people started reaching out to me and then that led me into this world
that was unknown at the time, besides my just limited knowledge of TBI.
(14:01):
I was like, I don't know what kinds of things you guys are dealing with. You got to explain it.
And so I just started to become a sponge. And I was like, what's going on?
What have you experienced? What have you tried? What have you not tried?
Let me dive into the mental health literature. I did not know much about mental
health when I started this process.
I mean, it was like even if somebody had asked me back then to define PTSD,
(14:24):
I couldn't have given them the criteria, which I think most people even diagnosed
with it aren't told what exactly it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so frustrating.
So I started educating myself as best I could on everything that my friends were facing.
And that was when I started seeing these corollaries between the different communities.
And yes, the operational environments are different.
(14:45):
The stressors are a little bit different in different ways. Like,
I think a lot of times people traditionally would say like, oh,
first responders don't have it as bad as like military service members.
And I would argue that they do in other ways. Like, I mean, there's so many
things that I think are so much harder for people in the first responder community
and law enforcement, especially, but the fire service as well and EMTs,
(15:08):
but, but law enforcement in particular.
And I think that that gets overlooked and it's another layer of stress.
Yeah. So I often would see the symptoms of, you call it stress overload,
but I call it operational allostatic overload, which is also kind of the term
(15:28):
for that in the soft community is operator syndrome.
People may be familiar with that. Yeah. Yeah. But I like to redefine it in physiological
terms because it makes sense then.
And also I don't want people to identify with it. Yeah.
Like something like PTSD or depression of like, I am this thing or I have this
thing. It's a part of me. It's like, well, no, there's.
(15:51):
It's describing a physiological process is how I like to frame it rather than like a thing you have.
It's a physiological process. It's what happens inside, like in your body.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
That way you don't get a hundred people saying, I got allostatic overload.
Yeah, you're just like, ah, man, no, that wasn't the goal. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I completely get that. So, I mean, now that we're bringing it up,
(16:14):
that's part of the things I wanted to talk to you about.
So with allostatic load, so for everyone else, can you just explain that,
you know, in your own terms, like what it is? And yes, it's not a diagnosis.
It's just what happens physiologically with you, you know, when you're going
through trauma, whatever you're going through. Right. Yeah.
So normally our bodies are trying to manage all of the stressors that are kind
(16:39):
of bombarding us at once.
And it does that through learning.
I mean, our brains are prediction making machines and our bodies are trying
to manage energy and predict what's happening next to be as efficient as possible
and to manage all these stressors. Yeah. It's always doing this.
And that's how our nervous system is wired.
Yes. And it's a good thing. So our normal state of like kind of balancing all
(17:04):
of that is called allostasis.
So maintaining allostasis is kind of what we're all seeking,
you know, the ideal situation.
And then allostatic load is anything that's causing like putting a load on that
system. So a stressor really.
And we are really adaptable and we can handle a lot. And so our bodies are constantly
(17:24):
being pushed and pulled in different directions and we're kind of,
you know, bouncing back and managing energy and all of that.
So allostatic load is kind of a normal part of living.
And for most of us, we kind of get pushed or pulled in a direction.
You can think about it like a pendulum, even though it's more like three-dimensional.
But, you know, say you get pushed by a stressor and you swing out.
(17:45):
Ideally, you'd want your stress response system to kick in and come back to baseline.
And then you get hit again and you, and maybe you get hit twice and you kind
of bounce a little far, but like you have the ability to come back to baseline
to recover, regenerate, recuperate, all of those things, build up that energy
budget again for your body.
Most people in this profession, in the first responder profession,
(18:06):
and also in the military, what happens is there are so many different types
of stressors bombarding, you know, physical, environmental,
psychological, that you start to push somebody out.
And as they swing back, they get hit again. And then they swing back and they get hit again.
And that could be a traumatic brain injury, a lack of sleep. Yeah.
(18:27):
Illness, when your children are sick or you're potentially sick or financial
burdens, your career's in jeopardy, all these things keep pushing you out.
So it doesn't have to be just a physical stressor. The psychological ones also
impact the same. It's one system that we have.
So it keeps pushing people out. And when you get out here in this arena so far
from baseline, it's like leaving your air conditioner running in Death Valley
(18:51):
with all your windows and doors Yeah. Yeah.
So the wheels are going to come off the bus. Yeah.
You cannot operate that way.
Well, for an extended period of time, there's going to be breakdown.
There's going to be dysfunction.
And that's the point where people like operator syndrome.
Right. It's like you look at the list of symptoms and there's all these dysfunctional systems.
(19:13):
That's the point where you're having breakdown. And I see that in the first
responder community so much.
And in a first responder community, it breaks my heart even more because people
in law enforcement and fire service and EMTs, it's not as much of a norm to
talk about it like it is in the veteran community.
(19:33):
And I've found working with folks when I was living in Montana and now here, the stigmas are real.
And the barriers to opening up and talking are so much worse in these communities. Absolutely.
Yeah. The thing is, though, it's because it's our careers. Right. So so unfortunately.
(19:54):
The way it would work is the minute, I mean, it's just like anything.
Oh, anyone have any issues, you know, you raise your hand and all of a sudden
now you're out of work for however long.
And that could be a career ender. So, and a lot of guys and gals have this passion,
this drive in the first responder community that they can't let go,
or they think that they're not good at anything else because now my job just told me I'm no good.
(20:20):
So, so that's one of the reasons
of the stigma behind it and if
you think you know with with the overload i mean you're
talking you know like i work in a medium-sized city so
i could see maybe anywhere between one to five traumatic type scenarios you
know in in a week in the place that you live yeah in the place that that i work
(20:44):
and and in the place that you're gonna yeah you're gonna be driving past yeah
yeah yeah so versus Versus, you know, when I was at war in Iraq,
I'm not going to have the same reactions because I haven't been there in, you know, decades.
So over here, yeah, we drive by the same exact places where I could tell you
exactly where a kid died. I could tell you exactly.
(21:04):
You can't help but think about it. Yeah, exactly. And when you think about it,
like you said, over and over again, or you just dealt with, you know,
let's say an infant who's dead.
And then right away, you got to get right back out to work.
It doesn't matter, you know, because there's another call waiting for you.
And you go to another call and it turns out to be just a BS,
let's say property dispute.
(21:25):
Two neighbors just, well, 30 years ago, and this is like true story.
30 years ago, the guy before who bought this house placed his shed in the middle,
three inches over the property line. And now you have to remove it.
This is real. This is actually, it's like, really?
So, but anyway, so you deal with like that debt and then you go deal with these
(21:45):
two neighbors who are going at it.
Nine times out of 10, the cop is going to have this emotional response.
Like he's just going to be like, get the fuck out. Like, you know, you'll lose your mind.
Yeah. How can you care and have compassion for those two people bickering when
you just saw like a loss of life?
Yeah. You're like, the scale is not the same here. No. And that's the unfortunate
part I find in the profession is there is no downtime after dealing with something like that,
(22:10):
especially after homicide investigations and stuff like that,
where we were literally up almost, it felt like, 30,
40 hours straight in a homicide investigation.
And yeah, we'll take, you know, after the case is resolved and all that, everyone's arrested.
Yeah, we'll take a day or two, you know, maybe vacation or take a break.
But even then, there's no time because you still have stuff you got to do on
(22:31):
the front and back end of this homicide, even though you arrested everybody.
But now you got more paperwork you got to do. You're talking to the lawyers,
you're talking to the courts. And so you're never done.
You know, like one of my cases, a real bad, you know, sex crime against a child.
And I had to work on that case for two and a half years so for two
and a half years i had to read through the notes i had to read through
(22:53):
the reports i had to look at the dna evidence
and i had to so so you know you can't like you said
though you know but that pendulum every time it hits
and then you get something else and then you get something else and eventually
in the first robotic community they break you know we break i mean because it's
just one thing after another after another and it never ends so i could totally
(23:14):
see how this overload that you describe really get to the first responder community.
I was talking to a close friend of mine, he's a Green Beret.
And he says, in his opinion,
he said, law enforcement is the equivalent to like a Green Beret because very
unconventional methods of dealing with the crowd, dealing with people,
(23:37):
and you're out there patrolling and doing whatever you're doing.
And he says, he kind of equates it to that. Yeah.
Because you're dealing with people.
Exactly. You're supposed to be compassionate all the time. Exactly.
And it makes it very, very tough. And, you know, with.
You know, building resilience within, you know, one thing I want to talk about
(23:58):
is kind of not so much the building resilience, but kind of the neurophysiological
science behind the stress and trauma.
Like, you know, when you're in that state of stress, right?
Let's say you dealt with a bad car accident, three, four people really injured.
Or actually, I'll give you a real one. I went to a, I went to,
I was the kind of incident command for a mass casualty type incident where a
(24:22):
car drove right into a building and hit a bunch of people.
So dealing with that and, you know, I was one of the first ones to show up.
The first two officers showed up. I mean, everyone did a phenomenal job, right?
Because you had, you know, for me, I was more like, all right,
who's the most wounded? Who's this? Who's that? And the fire department showed
up. So it was a lot going on.
And with that sort of, we'll call it stress and trauma, right?
(24:45):
Physiologically, what would be happening with me as I'm seeing all this stuff?
Because I know how I am. On mission, I ignore everything.
I'm on a mission. I got to do this, do this, do this, do this.
But then for me, it's always after.
We get that adrenaline dump or all of a sudden, I'm tired. I just want to sleep for three days.
So if you can just kind of go over a little bit about that. Yeah.
(25:06):
And it depends on the person, right?
Because some people get into these high stress, potentially traumatic situations,
and they get fully activated and they shine and they just like compartmentalize and motor through it.
And other people are completely debilitated from the get go.
So it does a little bit depend on, you know, the kind of person that you are,
(25:26):
but generally speaking, going into something like this, you know,
I like to talk about stress in terms of like physiology and body systems and
all of that. And so like, as you're.
Preparing to go in and deal with something that's potentially traumatic,
you know, you have your stress response system is kicking on already.
You've got activation of your sympathetic nervous system, which is the technically
(25:48):
the fight or flight kind of more activating side of things, which is turned
on to prepare the body for mobilization.
So, you know, you're, you're mobilizing glucose stores in your body.
You're, you're preparing to expend energy.
You're, you're you're potentially enhancing focus.
If your stress hormones like epinephrine,
(26:08):
norepinephrine, cortisol get too high, it can flood the system.
And that's where people end up kind of dissociating or instead of being hyper-focused,
like if you drank some caffeine and you're ready to go, it almost becomes something
where they can dissociate or they have a impairment of memory.
Is that that amygdala hijack type? Yeah, it's kind of like that, yeah. Yeah.
(26:30):
And you see this in certain people who are maybe predisposed to it.
There's correlations around which type of person may be which,
but again, it comes down to individual factors, training, all those things.
But you have essentially activation of these systems, maybe heightened,
I mean, certainly heightened arousal, but maybe heightened attention as well.
So it can go in either direction, but ideally you would have this activation
(26:55):
and preparation to be able to deal with what you're dealing with.
Now, when you see what's going on and you have visual input from maybe something
that's horrific, emotions start to kick in.
And for most people who have been well-trained and exposed to a lot of these
types of things, they've become very good at compartmentalizing.
So in that moment, there's this information, there's maybe a split second of
(27:19):
emotion that you realize if
you let yourself go there, that you're not gonna be able to do your job.
So you feel it and then you shut it down and you compartmentalize,
you put whatever that is in a box up on a shelf in your brain and you just keep moving forward.
And unfortunately, this is the kind of profession that demands that.
It's not maybe normal to do every day of your life, right?
(27:45):
It's a survival strategy. It's very effective and I'm glad we have it because we need Yeah.
Well, I just think of like our primal days. Yeah, we had it because when a saber-toothed
tiger was chasing us, that's something we needed, but not on a daily basis of
running into the fire, we'll say, so to speak.
Totally. Yeah. So, well, and with that analogy, right? Like it made sense to
(28:06):
mobilize for physical things, but like emotional stress activates the same system
and it's like you're being chased by the saber-toothed tiger.
But in reality, you're just thinking about your ex or your finances or something,
right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The compartmentalization thing is really important, but I think what happens
in this profession, in the first responder profession especially,
(28:28):
and military for sure, is that you have to do it so frequently.
And with the first responder community, like you said, you don't have that downtime
where you're not on anymore.
On deployments, you've got to extend it over the period of deployment.
When you come home, there may be other things that you have to deal with,
but you're not at risk of getting shot at.
(28:52):
It's a different scenario. So you do have a little bit of that downtime to recover.
With the first responder community, you might have a day or two.
If you take a vacation, it's maybe a week. You don't really have a lot of time to recover.
So you're pretty much putting things in boxes on shelves every day.
Yeah. And we have the capacity to hold a lot, but at some point with the stressors
(29:16):
we were talking about before and your pendulum,
you know, this allostasis getting to the point of being pushed into allostatic overload. Yeah.
That's where our ability to manage everything starts to fall apart.
And so now I, the analogy I like to give is like, you try to put another box
on the shelf and in the process, because it's so full,
(29:36):
you knock a bunch off and now you're driving down the street to go get groceries
and you start bawling out of nowhere. And you don't like, I don't even know
where that's coming from.
Or you just get angry, you have rage, and you don't understand.
You know, it's like, I had a client that was telling me, and I love this,
I hope he listens to this podcast, because if he ever hears this story,
he's gonna be like, that was me.
(29:57):
But he told me this story, and I say it all the time, because it's hilarious,
but also very real, that he was in this point of allostatic overload,
knocking boxes off of shelves, his physical function wasn't great.
I was just dealing with a lot. And you know those chip bags where they have
like a, you can tear off the top.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like pre-torn, but there's a zipper.
(30:17):
Yeah, yeah. So you tear off the top and then the zipper's there.
You eat chips and you zip it back up, right?
Well, his wife cut below the zipper. Oh. And he was like, why would you do that?
You know, like he just couldn't. He blew up. He lost it when he saw what she
did. He just lost it. Yeah.
It's a minor thing, right? Like this is not something to like,
this is not a hill you want to die on. But in that moment, he couldn't,
(30:41):
it was for him and his defense, what was going on for him physiologically was
she wasn't paying attention.
She's a liability. This is a risk. If she's not paying attention to detail,
this could get somebody killed. That's actually makes sense to me.
You know, right. It makes sense because it's those checks, the boxes that we
(31:02):
check when we're running ops and doing all these things is, yeah, that's funny.
Funny that that's what I always tell like brand new cops on the job,
pay attention, the smallest detail could save your life or could kill you like
if you miss it. So yeah, I could totally see how.
But again, like you said though, when he's been compartmentalizing over and
over and over and then that little minor thing, because it happens to me too
(31:24):
with my son sometimes where it's just a minor thing.
I get it and I blow up and my wife gives me the look and-
Then it turns into, yeah, let's go at it. But it does make a lot of sense that
over the course of a week,
again, one to five traumatic things, and then finally the littlest thing just sets me right off.
(31:46):
And like you said, it makes perfect sense.
So in terms of training that resilience inside a department,
I can tell you that law enforcement does a piss poor job.
There is no training other Other than if you're on a specialty unit like SWAT,
like I am, we train for force on force and all kinds of different scenarios
(32:08):
and all kinds of different things. And we do a lot of stress shoots.
So we get that arousal up and it's kind of like the inverted U theory, right?
Where we concentrate on a task or skill over and over and over and over.
Just like I say in the military when we're doing room clearing,
we'll do that till we throw up. It gets so boring, but there's a reason behind it, right?
(32:31):
There's a reason why we will battle drills, right? Battle drills,
battle over and over and over again.
It's that way when that arousal happens, we hit that peak performance.
And that's like you said, for me, it's kind of funny. I wear a heart rate monitor.
So when I'm doing like an op or anything intense at work, I love to see where I was, where I'm at.
(32:52):
Matt, because again, I don't really, I can't really tell if my heart rate spikes
or whatever in the moment, but sure enough, you'll see like my heart rate will spike to 170, 175.
And as I'm in the situation, it starts to drop because I've been trained and
conditioned to be able to operate in that environment.
Then on the flip side, I'm like, yeah, but if you throw a snake in front of
(33:14):
me, I'll scream like a girl and I'll run up 10 miles the other direction.
But the thing is, in the law, like I said, they're not training the officers for any of that.
So in the academy, we never talked about amygdala hijack.
We never talked about the importance of checking yourself or mentally checking yourself and stuff.
(33:36):
And, and I think, you know, that's why I think you have a lot of these cops
that are walking, talking disasters because they don't know.
Yeah. Right. They don't know what's going on. They weren't prepared well to
deal with the stressors of the profession.
No. And it's not, I mean, everybody needs to take responsibility for themselves,
but when you don't know, it's not your fault really.
(33:58):
I mean, there's, there's, everybody needs to like hire up,
you know, through administration needs to do a better job of bringing trainings
in and creating more opportunities for that kind of thing to help people because,
because it is, it's really important.
It's, it's really important for the individual human who is the law enforcement officer, right?
(34:21):
Yeah. Who is a human being. Let's remember that. Yeah. Yeah. People forget.
I know. No, it's important for their well-being, but it's important for the
investment of the organization, the money they've put into training that person.
But it's important for the people that they're interacting with.
You know, I mean, it's of critical importance to be able to train people well
(34:41):
and to help them and set them up for success and to deal with these things that are very...
Very real physiological issues and psychological issues that we understand and
can put things into place to deal with.
But even the compartmentalization piece, I mean, there needs to be some room
for people to downregulate, to process what they experienced,
(35:05):
whether it's a peer support specialist or they need to just go out in nature
and do their thing for a little while and process it the way that they process things.
I mean, people need that, that room because when you just keep shoving stuff
down, putting things on boxes, I mean, there's, there's going to be a blow off valve at some point.
And that's, you know, that's, that's maybe an indicator that you're at that
(35:26):
point. That's the thing.
Like, like with me, like I, I love doing ARs with my guys and gals after a critical incident.
We'll do a quick, you know, quick AR in the morning, you know, the next day.
That way, you know, guys think about whatever and we'll just kind of hash through
the AR and, and leave it at that.
And I always, you know, no matter what, I always recommend to all the officers,
(35:46):
hey, go, if you need help, seek help. Like there's nothing wrong with it.
And that shows more strength than weakness, you know, and, and I always say that.
And, you know, for one thing is also another factor that I see,
not just, you know, with the stress and trauma, but also burnout in the law
enforcement and first responder communities.
Because I was reading a study, actually, from the Journal of Police and Criminal
(36:10):
Psychology, up to 90% of police officers experience symptoms of burnout at some point in their careers.
So, like I work in a city, burnout rate is much higher for people that work
in a city because the demands are so much on a city and we're always understaffed.
We'll never be, you know, you're never fully staffed. And the same study found
(36:31):
that nearly one in five police officers meet the diagnostic criteria of full-blown burnout. So, yeah.
Those officers, all of us, you know, officers that are out there where we're
working 16 to 20 hour days even, and then going home to sleep for four,
five, six hours, that's not nearly enough rest. No, it's an unwinnable situation.
(36:52):
Exactly. And I've read a study, I forget where, but I read a study saying that,
you know, that sort of schedule that law enforcement has and you're working, it's equivalent to,
I think they said like a BAC level of 0.1 something. thing like this, you're drunk.
Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. And I don't, I don't think people understand this.
Like it's really like that, that does matter.
(37:15):
And it, it, the going back to allostasis, like that lack of sleep,
all those stressors impact your ability to stay centered.
And that, you know, I was kind of referencing some work done by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
She has this theory, the theory of constructed emotion and affective realism,
but she talks about police officers and law enforcement officers and how these
(37:39):
demands and ultimately the affective state that they're in colors their perception.
So for example, they did studies looking at law enforcement officers and perturbing
them in different ways, basically trying to get them to experience different types of emotions.
And then from that, be exposed to like a specific scenario That would maybe
(38:03):
be a person holding a weapon or something like that.
The way our brain works, it's again, going back to what I mentioned earlier,
it's a prediction making machine. So it fills in the blank.
And if a scenario based off of previous experience, whether it's really real
experience you've had, things you've heard of, something you watched on TV.
Your brain is making predictions to be ready to anticipate what to do next.
(38:27):
So it can fill in something that looks like a gun to a person.
Their perception was that that person was holding a weapon when they really
weren't. And everything that that person experienced prior to that moment is
playing into that person's perception of that moment. That's interesting.
So I read this book, Left of Bang. They talk about perception.
(38:51):
And I've kind of really dug and started looking research into people's perception
and how when you watch a use of force type video and one cop shoots and the
other one didn't, it's because, again,
to me, body cams do not give you the officer's perspective or perception.
They're just showing you what is just a visual representation of what happened,
(39:15):
not what was actually going on in here.
And there was a, there was one case that was done, I don't know if you've heard for science.
Yeah, they do a lot of studies and stuff, yeah, on law enforcement.
And they were sharing this case that they worked where an officer was dark and,
like, you know, even through the body cam, what appeared to be the guy holding
(39:35):
what looked like a firearm.
And what Force9 did is they do a great job of recreating all the things that led to the shooting.
And through their analysis, what it turned out to be, the guy was holding a
cell phone, kind of like a gun. But he was in like a dark corner of the backyard.
And even though that the body cam enhanced the image, and you could clearly
(40:00):
see it wasn't really a firearm, but the stance the guy took made it perception
of the officer, oh, shoot, this guy just drew a gun. I need to fire back.
So it's interesting you bring that up about that perception.
Yeah, it's like the affective state or how you feel about how you feel,
essentially, really plays into this.
And that's where you're asking officers to make split-second decisions on lack
(40:24):
of sleep and all these other stressors.
And that's where I think training has a place to be adaptable for this specific thing,
because I think if people could train in scenarios that put them in different
affective states when they're happy, when they're tired, when they're angry,
when they're depressed, when they're, you know, like if you can get people to
(40:47):
like do it in all those different ways.
So that way when they show up to do the job and they're in that state,
they've trained well enough to know that maybe there, there is that ability
to take that extra second and, and realize like.
Again, your brain is kind of filling in the blanks here, but if there's any
way to insert a pause and allow somebody to really take a breath,
(41:12):
again, sometimes it's a very split second decision.
You don't have a second, you know? So I, I'm not trying to solve the problem.
It's far more complex, but I want to introduce that for people to,
to contemplate because it is important.
And the same thing with like affective states, you make really,
you make totally different decisions when you're feeling, you know,
maybe a little down versus happy.
(41:34):
And there's tons of research on this. So this isn't earth shattering stuff,
but it is important because the more we get to know ourselves and when we're
in a specific type of mood or feeling a specific kind of way,
we know, oh, I'm in that place.
I'm feeling this way. I'm probably going to make decisions this way.
(41:54):
And maybe I shouldn't be making decisions right now.
That is also very valuable. So that's the thing. We like to,
what's called like a mental health day where we'll just not come to work.
We'll call it a mental health day and we'll just relax because there are days,
I mean, every cop feels it. There are days where you're like,
you know what, I'm not feeling it. I'm staying home.
This is not, you know, and, you know, we'll call it a mental health day.
(42:15):
It's really take a sick day, quote unquote.
And you're just like, just stay home and just relax. Because to me,
you know, I've had officers show up to work with only like maybe two hours of sleep.
It's because of personal stressors, right?
Kid's sick. This is sick. This, this, you know, dog wasn't feeling well.
So I had to take it to the ER.
You know, I was up till four and I have to be at work at eight.
(42:36):
So by the time I got home and I literally tell the officer, I'm like,
why did you come in then, man? You're not ready.
You know, so what I ended up doing for one officer is I put the officer like
on a whole, like on, on the other end, like just like.
Go hide. If we need you, we'll call you. Because to me, that's more of a liability,
quote unquote, not just to the officer themselves, but also to the partners
(43:00):
and to the community too, because you're not thinking.
Your mind is just exhausted by all the other things that have been going on in your life.
And you're basically tired.
And speaking of, you're saying training and
scenarios and stuff like that is that's one thing that that
i've always pushed is scenario-based training
(43:22):
and you know i bring back to like you know when i was in basic where they give
you your rifle for the first time and whether it's cold snow and rain in middle
of the night it doesn't matter you're going to be training with it they don't
care if they wake you up at two in the morning you better be able to take it
apart put it together or you better have your serial number memorized and all that.
But all those things you put together though, builds that automatic system where
(43:47):
now you're not even really thinking about it because you've rehearsed it so
much, whether you're tired, wet, hungry, you just go do it.
So that's one thing where I've been really trying to push realistic simulated
scenarios, stress exposure training.
That way officers have some idea when they step into an active shooter,
(44:08):
what they're actually going to be feeling, right?
Some sort of, you know, you build it, right?
I mean, I always tell the story of, you know, when one of my guys I knew out
in Iraq got blown up and killed by an IED, my body went into automatic mode
when I was switching the radio freaks to talk to the air support and everybody else.
But because it's been rehearsed so much that it didn't really take a lot of
(44:32):
what we'll call brain power to do it because I just do do.
Pushed buttons, turned a couple dials, and I was dialed in. I was good to go.
But you always see these officers, like I'll hear it over the radio.
They're going to a call, and they're screaming into the radio because they're
in that panicked state. And you're like, oh, Jesus.
You're like, oh, boy. You know, it's going to be a disaster.
(44:55):
So within each agency, I'd say, unfortunately, there's not that training,
especially in the patrol division.
They don't get that training. No, I know. And the level of training is not enough for people.
And people expect, I mean, it's like the general public expects law enforcement
officers to be perfect. And they're human.
(45:15):
And many don't get the training that you've had. And I think expectations are
unrealistic for what the reality is of what we're giving officers.
And officers need more training. And I think that's a whole other conversation
about that. Don't get me started on that. Yeah.
Well, I mean, I write for Havoc Journal a lot, and most of my articles kind
(45:38):
of revolve around the idea behind how training just sucks for law enforcement.
Unless you're in a specialty unit like bomb squad or whatever else,
unless you're doing any of those things, you're not getting the right training.
You're not getting the training you need.
I mean, I know patrol officers or agencies that the only training their cops
get is the academy, and that's it.
(45:59):
And maybe they'll go shoot at the range once or twice a year.
And that's it. And I'm not setting people up. No, no.
And to me, it's like, you're just shoveling and pushing people out the door,
you know, here's a badge and a gun and go forth and, you know,
hope you do some good, kind of like a hope and a prayer, you know?
So it's like, it's like, it's, it's so frustrating. It breaks my heart for,
(46:21):
for everybody involved.
You know, it's just, it's, yeah, it's not a, it's no, it's not.
And And, you know, there's times where I've hit that.
You know load where i tried to stay as in tune as
i can with with my body and my mind because just over the
years of learning and kind of just me being
(46:41):
a nerd and interested in all those things you know so but it
really kind of taught me a lot about myself where i can you know the next day
or the day after if i go through something and i'm extremely tired i'm like
i know what that's from that's from x but one day i i did not realize so i i
you know we had a training down in connecticut at the range with the SWAT team.
(47:02):
And I'll never forget, I was in the car driving and I just broke down.
And two days prior, I almost shot and killed somebody because it was a really,
really bad dude that would have worn out for his arrest.
He's like a gang enforcer, street level type guy, but really, really bad.
And his threat matrix was off the charts. And I was an assistant team leader.
(47:23):
So me and the team leader, commander, we set up the whole op and putting all the plans together.
So you're talking maybe we worked on it for like two weeks prior to the date
of doing it and all the intel we're getting and everything and putting it together.
So you have all those stressors coming together.
And then the day of the op, I'll never forget, it was a Boston cop.
(47:44):
We were helping them. It was a huge roundup of gangs. It was like one of the
massive ops. Yeah. It was like multiple SWAT teams involved.
It was during COVID when one of
the good idea if Harry's hit the district attorney's
office and we're like well let's release some of the jail
because that way whatever and they picked the worst type of
people to release not your yeah not your you know stole something and yeah you
(48:09):
know what yeah you can go you know what I mean so so they picked the worst of
the worst let them go and they put GPS money like okay that's gonna really help
but anyway so before I get into that part but so you know we we did the whole
planning and everything.
And I remember that day. So that morning, early morning, we were going through
the op, briefing the rest of the team of what we want, kind of expectations
(48:32):
and who this guy is and what, all the things.
And I'll never forget a Boston cop, usually the detectives, they'll have a thing
ready for them, kind of their final brief, I guess, the detectives where I'll
say, hey, detective, anything I missed?
And they'll stand up and usually it's no, or if they have something extra they'll
(48:52):
they'll they'll give us but the one thing this detective said was.
Just so you know, the district attorney is looking to screw a cop over. So be careful.
I'm like, great. And I'm number one through the door because I had a big rifle
shield, 50-pound shield.
So I'm like, I'm going to be the guy who's going to shoot this dude,
and I'm going to end up in jail because this district attorney, whatever.
(49:16):
And our percentage, I think, at the time for a shootout with this guy was close to 97%.
He was that bad. that's why we decided to take a big shield with us and like
yeah you know just in case and i remember we did the entry it was early morning
did the entry went right to his mom's basement granted of course it was a mom's
basement goes right in mom's basement he was he ducks out of his bedroom
(49:40):
i'm going with the rest of the team behind me and i'll
never forget he was reaching to his bed i went in the room he was reaching his
bed i had my gun right there there was it was a clock that he
was going for and i kept telling him don't do it i'm
squeezing the trigger and he's like oh you know he gave
up so it was a near like i almost all i
needed was maybe another half pound pressure and see you later but two
(50:00):
days later that's when you know driving broke down i'm like what the hell is
that from but i faulted myself because i didn't work on it because i was because
again as a team lead you're like you know it's just team lead my mind was on
the other guys and everything else you know exactly you know even after the
arrest and making sure the guys are good and everyone's good and everyone's that.
And I'll show you pictures later with a news guy.
(50:23):
He's a buddy of mine. He does like photography for the news.
He took a bunch of pictures. I'm like, you asshole.
But I'll show you the pictures of it. It was interesting, my posture, how I was.
And I'm like, oh yeah, that's definitely the stress I'm trying to relieve.
Because you can see I'm stretching. I'm doing like...
Things that intuitively yeah intuitively i'm not
even realizing i'm doing it so so and
(50:43):
again like i faulted myself because i didn't really work on myself
after that i didn't realize how what was
going on in my head at the time but sometimes you don't
know how it's gonna hit yeah you know like i mean sometimes
like i talked to lots of friends in
the military and they had lots of experiences in combat and
shooting and killing people and sometimes it was no issue
(51:05):
and other times it was like that one that one
instance and they couldn't have known or predicted that
why that one time versus another really affected them and and it's challenging
and sometimes you don't know until it like crops up later but one thing people
don't understand though about really high stress and potentially traumatic situations
is that post-traumatic stress is normal following an experience like that.
(51:31):
It's your body saying, wow, we almost died or that was really a close call.
I should maybe be a little bit more alert for a while in case this happens again,
right? It's a normal survival instinct.
Now over time, that post-traumatic stress subsides, you realize you're safe.
It's in the past, the event happened and it's no longer happening.
And you kind of go back to a baseline and feeling better and moving through life normally again,
(51:56):
whatever your normal is and for some
people it just gets stuck in that on position
and that's then what goes on to become post-traumatic
stress disorder yeah but but for most people that initial phase of stress hypervigilance
inability to sleep maybe nightmares and some flashbacks initially early on inexplicable
(52:18):
emotion all of that stuff can
be part of your body kind of processing and letting go of what happened.
But again, there's a lot that, you know, for some people just continues.
And there's just so much we don't understand about this too.
You know, I'm talking about a lot of these things that are the theories that we have.
When it comes to neuroscience and humans and psychology, we can't open someone's
(52:42):
head and know exactly what's happening.
So, you know, this is basing a lot of, you know, a lot of things on theory.
Yeah. Theories that make sense, but also everybody's a little different,
you know? Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, we've had one officer who ended up quitting right after a homicide.
You know, that officer could not handle it. Completely broke down.
(53:02):
It was still brand new to the job.
And as soon as they witnessed, I mean, it was, it was quite the crazy scene,
but it was enough for that officer to say, you know what, I'm all set,
you know, and, and which commend them for that because might as well get it
early on versus deciding to, you know, toughen it up and toughen out and,
you know, let it creep up another time.
(53:23):
But yeah, everyone's designed, I guess, built differently.
I don't know if you find this, but within the law enforcement community,
the combat veteran seems to be a little more resilient than your average civilian
police officer, just because I think just from the stuff we've done. Totally.
And a lot of people who are drawn to the military profession in general are
(53:44):
already a little bit sturdier.
I thought you were going to say crazier. I'm like, yeah, that's true too.
Resilient is maybe another way to put it.
And I mean that in a way, you know, this is definitely applicable to the soft community for sure.
But I think the military at large as well, you see a lot of people who come
from really difficult upbringings. You see a lot of adverse childhood experiences.
(54:07):
And you see a lot of people who end up being able to shoulder a lot more stress
later in life. Now, this doesn't mean that they're superhuman,
because as I described, physiology is physiology, right?
So just because somebody had a rough childhood and is able to shoulder more
stress doesn't mean that it's not going to come back to affect them later in life, right? Yeah.
(54:29):
Pay attention to that stuff. None of us are superhuman. Some of us are able
to handle a lot more than others.
And God bless those people because we need them. But also, it can come at a
cost for that person eventually.
Well, yeah, that's the thing that, yes, we need people like that because it's
an unthankless job, unforgiving job.
(54:50):
I think what agencies need to do is invest in their people.
Yeah. And that's the biggest thing. And usually Usually with cities,
I always see it with the city council, whatever.
Well, what is it going to cost? And what, you know, to them,
it's all the money. And that's the whole defund the police. Yeah.
You know, all that bullshit. Yeah. I mean, seriously.
Yeah. It destroyed the profession even more than it. The professions already destroyed.
(55:13):
But it really, really hurt the profession even more. And now,
you know, I say we're like maybe 30 years, 40 years back versus where we should
be now with all these different movements and all that stuff.
But I digress before I get into that part.
But so being respectful, respectful of your timing, I know you drove all the
(55:36):
way out here and we're in the 22 Mohawks headquarters. Yes, which is awesome.
Yeah. And, you know, if there was something, you know, we like to ask this for
everybody that comes on the show.
If there's one thing you would want, like advice to police officer or firefighter,
military veteran, if something that they should do to make themselves that much
(55:57):
better, what would it be?
That is a great question.
I would say to not be hesitant or afraid to invest in yourself.
I know a lot of people get into these professions because they want to serve
(56:18):
and they often put themselves last,
but for you to be the best version of yourself at that job, but then also to
be the best version of yourself to your family and your friends and all of that,
the time it takes to take care of yourself, to learn about your,
like paying attention to why you do things, your patterns, utilizing tools,
(56:41):
whatever they may be to move through things and And to recover well,
whether it's physical or psychological injuries, visible, invisible,
whatever it is, putting that time in to take care of yourself,
I think, is critical because we need people who are healthy.
Is achieving optimal wellness, who are also serving their communities and their country.
(57:03):
And everybody is a human being at the end of the day and deserves that.
Yeah. Thank you very much. And yeah, that's a huge reminder to everybody. We are all human.
And, you know, with being human comes at a cost when we're dealing with situations,
whether it was 20 years of GWAT or every day putting your vest on and going
(57:24):
out the door to maybe could be the last day you see your kids or could,
you know, it's, it's, you know, you, you always have those things in the back
of your mind when you walk out that door.
But for those types of people that walk out that door, I mean,
it's, it takes just courage and bravery alone just to be able to do it.
So taking care of yourself, that's a huge, great advice, um,
(57:47):
because can't stress that enough.
Uh, but Kate, thank you so much for coming. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, like that first in-person interview over at, you know, inside 22 Mohawks HQ.
So everybody out there, stay safe and stay sapient.
Music.
Project Sapient is a podcast meant to engage our brothers and sisters in the
law enforcement and military communities in conversations we all know we need to have.
All opinions you'll hear are our own, are protected by our First Amendment of
the United States Constitution, and in no way reflect or are meant to reflect
the opinion of any specific agency, officer, or service member.
(00:20):
Some opinions may be controversial.
Listener discretion is advised.
Music.
We'll be right back. All right, everyone. Project Sapien's back.
(00:44):
Jake's not with us today because technology. Just didn't decide or wanted to work with us today.
But it's actually a very special episode. Been trying for, feels like almost 10 years, Kate.
It's been a long time. Yeah, trying to get you on the show, and you just happened
to move into Boston, and I'm like, you know what?
(01:06):
Let's do it. Now we got to do it. Yeah, and in person. And in person, exactly.
So this is actually Project Sapiens' first in-person interview,
as you can tell with all the wires everywhere.
You've got an excellent setup here. So it's interesting, but I'm really excited, Kate, to get you on.
So I'm going to do a quick intro for those waiting to figure out who Kate is.
(01:30):
So here's a quick intro and bio about Kate. So Dr. Kate Pate, right?
Okay. You correct me. You're like, nope. Dr.
Kate Pate is a PhD neurophysiologist, coach, and entrepreneur with extensive
experience in scientific research and practical applications in the military and soft community.
(01:50):
Her doctoral work focused on respiratory neurophysiology, exploring the brain-breath-body
connection, and later expanded to include trauma-informed yoga and meditation for the military.
Cate's postdoctoral research centered on redox biology related to inflammatory
diseases, including traumatic brain injury, a personal and professional interest
(02:14):
due to her own experiences with head injuries.
She transitioned from academia to industry, becoming a program director for
combat casualty care research, driven by her connection to the special operations community through her.
As the founder and CEO of Karuna Medical, she develops innovative medical devices
for austere environments with funding from the Department of Defense and the
(02:38):
National Institutes of Health.
Kate's passion for helping service members and veterans with complex health
issues led to her to pursue training in transformational recovery,
psychedelic integration, and functional medicine.
In addition to her medical work, Kate is dedicated to environmental conservation,
hunting, mountain sports, and helping the underserved.
(02:59):
She's pursuing a graduate degree in theology to further support the spiritual
health of those she helps. Like, wow.
You could have just said she works in the community or something.
No, no. Well, the thing is, though, you've done a lot, right?
And you do a lot for the veteran community.
(03:21):
And, you know, if you want to just kind of go into some of the work you've done,
especially with TBI and what you found over the years that you've been doing this.
I mean, just for context, I was in 2005 when I was in Iraq.
So for us, TBI was still foreign. It wasn't never even mentioned.
(03:42):
All of a sudden now, much later in years, they started talking about TBI.
So if you want to go over kind of how that all came about. Yeah,
well, and for folks from the earlier years and the GWAT years,
I mean, that wasn't talked about very often.
And so now it is an issue, right?
We're kind of, it's a known known at this point. So people are paying attention
(04:03):
when they're on active duty, when they get, or even in law enforcement,
the breacher community, people are paying attention now to when they might break.
You know, some eating some charges or whatever, you know, shooting a Gustav
or whatever it might be in whatever scenario or environment you're in.
But back then it was part of like the normal training, normal exposures and combat.
(04:24):
And so people weren't mentally tracking that stuff.
So you look back and you're like, well, I'm sure I was exposed to blast pretty
regularly, but I honestly don't remember because I wasn't mentally tracking
it at the time. It wasn't a known thing.
So for a lot of people from like the earlier years, I mean, I feel like for
many, they kind of assume, and probably rightly so, but then there's like an
(04:45):
unknown quantity or amount, you know?
And so it is really challenging for folks who have likely been exposed and maybe
greatly so, but just don't have the evidence for it because they weren't paying
attention at the time. It's a shame.
No, I mean, so my run-in with TBI first time ever was when I came home,
I decided, let me jump into college right away, you know? So jumped into college.
(05:10):
And at the, But before now, it's funny that the before and after when you learn about TBI.
So before, you know, GPA was like 3.5 and above.
And I was like one of them photographic memories. And I could just,
you know, like a parrot, you know, basically regurgitate whatever I read.
And when I came back home and then decided to jump right back into it,
(05:31):
my GPA dropped to like a 1.9.
I almost flunked out of college completely. And I was getting so pissed off
and frustrated, like, what the hell's wrong with me?
And that was really the first time where I...
Was like, you know what, I need to get checked, you know, see what the hell's
going on because this is not the norm.
Yeah. It wasn't for lack of effort. It was just like your brain isn't working
(05:54):
the way that it's used to and you can't focus and you're not retaining information.
And yeah, it's really, it's really challenging. And, and my kind of interest
in this or foray into TBI research really started when I was really young.
I loved brain and I was just a nerd. I I love brain stuff. I love neuroscience.
I used to read like neuroscience for dummies when I was like eight years old,
(06:15):
but I was really interested in that.
And then my, one of my older brothers got a really bad concussion from racing motocross.
And that was my first experience with anybody directly.
And I saw how it impacted him.
And I was really curious around that. And then as I got older,
I got really interested in various sports and horseback riding and mountain
(06:37):
biking, skiing, snowboarding.
And I started having my head injuries of my own, a number of them.
And some when I was younger didn't quite affect me so much, but I had a really
bad accident in 2016, mountain biking in New Zealand.
And I had a gnarly concussion, a bunch of sutures in my face.
And I was teaching at a medical school in Colorado at the time.
(06:58):
And trying to come back from that and teach, I was putting PowerPoints together
and it wasn't making sense to me.
And on. And I'm looking at these screens and I'm trying to remember what all of this means.
And I'm having to read a paragraph 10 times.
Just all of that was really frustrating.
So that was my direct experience with it. But at that time, I had already studied
(07:23):
TBI and so kind of knew what was happening and was trying to do all the right
things for myself to put things into place to recover well,
which at the time, it's like just because you have the knowledge doesn't mean
you're gonna do what you're supposed to do exactly i am guilty of that for sure but i had studied.
Backing up a few years, during my graduate work and into the postdoctoral years,
(07:46):
I had opportunities to study neurotrauma, spinal cord injury and traumatic brain injury.
And looking at, you mentioned redox biology, it was this balance of oxidants
and antioxidants in the body that can often contribute to inflammatory diseases, essentially.
Neurotrauma being one of these processes that involves inflammation that can go awry over time.
(08:09):
And we're really interested in looking at therapeutics to
kind of shut down the inappropriate inflammatory
response in that long-term part of you
know the the injury process yeah so that
was a lot of the work that i was doing as a postdoc was traumatic brain injury
and spinal cord injury work looking at different therapeutics to try to mitigate
(08:31):
these these inflammatory cascades that lead to long-term problems okay so because
we were doing drug discovery research we couldn't publish on anything because if you publish,
then you can't get a patent on, you know, the stuff.
So unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to present or publish on a lot of that
(08:51):
work, but there's a lot of promising data that came out of that work and that
those therapeutics were taken forth into cancer and radiation biology research
and they're in clinical trials now.
So Maybe at some point they could be used off-label for TBI research.
(09:11):
Maybe they could be used for a clinical trial.
Perhaps. I don't know if that's… Without trying to pry too much,
I get the whole patent thing.
Is it just because Big Pharma wouldn't want something like that?
Because you know how the VA is with their rainbow pills that they throw at veterans.
Is it something like, oh, that could hurt the Big Pharma industry? industry.
(09:35):
It's not so much that as much like as ultimately you would want,
I mean, I hate to say this, but ultimately you would kind of want like a big
pharma to pick it up because they're the ones who have the money to take it forward.
I mean, it's really difficult to do this work without deep pockets,
but they will never pick up a drug if it won't be profitable,
(09:57):
even if it could cure every disease on the planet.
It's like if they can't make money off it, they won't take it forward and
so to make money they have to have ip you know
intellectual property secured patents around it yeah
so for us developing a new therapeutic you want
to wait and get as long of a patent life
as possible so you kind of push off publishing for a while till you file your
(10:19):
patent gotcha and then once you file the patent you know you that the clock
starts ticking basically you've got to get to a point where you've got good
clinical data for somebody to come pick it up and take it forward. So it's a, it's a, it's.
Complex process. And it's really unfortunate that it works that way. Yeah.
That's, I mean, for, for the lay person, I say, I guess just,
(10:41):
you know, people like me,
just like, you know, so much red tape for, let's say an obvious answer,
you know, like, you know, instead of, you know, doing what you typically do,
a veteran comes home and then they go see the VA.
The VA says you have PTSD and TBI. That seemed to be like the go-to PTSD and TBI.
(11:02):
Here's a bunch of your pills and good luck. Yeah.
You know, like pretty much it as much, I mean, not to knock the VA too much.
I mean, they've, they've done great strides, but they're missing a lot of stuff
compared to when I first went to the VA back in 2008 is when I finally pulled
the trigger and went to the VA and it was an awful, awful experience.
(11:23):
And I walked away and then went back after a A friend of mine,
recent, more like in 2020, actually during COVID, oh, just before actually,
2019, he told me to definitely go back because it's completely changed compared to what we know it as.
And yeah, and I was impressed with some of the things that they're doing.
But again- Trying to think outside the box. Exactly. But it's a big behemoth,
(11:46):
you know? It's just difficult.
It's the bureaucracy of- It is. You know, of the whole thing. Yeah.
Kind of shifting gears, though, I know when me and you, we spoke a while ago
and how you, you know, from your work in the veteran community,
the soft community, you started seeing more first responders, right?
Law enforcement, firefighters, and you started kind of, I say,
(12:09):
like doing a correlation almost like, oh, shit, they pretty much have the same
issues, just different operating theaters, so to speak.
So can you go into like a little bit of what you've been noticing and working on? Yeah.
And I'll tie it back into the TBI stuff because that was really what led my
work there and then teaching at a medical school.
And then you described the kind of trajectory of my career and then working
(12:32):
for this combat casualty care research program.
It led me into the space of operational medicine, we'll just say.
Say and that obviously applications
for the military community but also applications for
first responder communities as well and going to
special operations medical association meetings and things like that i was starting
(12:53):
to see and meet lots of people from the first command first responder community
yeah and because they they were aware of the research that i had done in the
background tbi and some of the other things that i had done people in these communities that
I was crossing paths with, just started to open up a little bit.
They were like, okay, well, she's not associated with the unit that I'm a part of.
(13:17):
She's not a psychologist or a
mental health clinic. Like I'm not gonna be therapized when I talk to her.
People were like, okay, but I could talk to her about this. And so I think I
was kind of a safe space for people to just open up to naturally.
People would say stuff about TBI. Like I'm pretty sure I got,
blown up or I definitely did. And now I don't know what's going on, but I'm not okay.
(13:40):
And I don't really know where to go. I don't want to go through the traditional
channels for all the reasons you mentioned, but I don't want to get yanked from a team.
I don't, you know, there's all these, these barriers to seeking help.
And so people started reaching out to me and then that led me into this world
that was unknown at the time, besides my just limited knowledge of TBI.
(14:01):
I was like, I don't know what kinds of things you guys are dealing with. You got to explain it.
And so I just started to become a sponge. And I was like, what's going on?
What have you experienced? What have you tried? What have you not tried?
Let me dive into the mental health literature. I did not know much about mental
health when I started this process.
I mean, it was like even if somebody had asked me back then to define PTSD,
(14:24):
I couldn't have given them the criteria, which I think most people even diagnosed
with it aren't told what exactly it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so frustrating.
So I started educating myself as best I could on everything that my friends were facing.
And that was when I started seeing these corollaries between the different communities.
And yes, the operational environments are different.
(14:45):
The stressors are a little bit different in different ways. Like,
I think a lot of times people traditionally would say like, oh,
first responders don't have it as bad as like military service members.
And I would argue that they do in other ways. Like, I mean, there's so many
things that I think are so much harder for people in the first responder community
and law enforcement, especially, but the fire service as well and EMTs,
(15:08):
but, but law enforcement in particular.
And I think that that gets overlooked and it's another layer of stress.
Yeah. So I often would see the symptoms of, you call it stress overload,
but I call it operational allostatic overload, which is also kind of the term
(15:28):
for that in the soft community is operator syndrome.
People may be familiar with that. Yeah. Yeah. But I like to redefine it in physiological
terms because it makes sense then.
And also I don't want people to identify with it. Yeah.
Like something like PTSD or depression of like, I am this thing or I have this
thing. It's a part of me. It's like, well, no, there's.
(15:51):
It's describing a physiological process is how I like to frame it rather than like a thing you have.
It's a physiological process. It's what happens inside, like in your body.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
That way you don't get a hundred people saying, I got allostatic overload.
Yeah, you're just like, ah, man, no, that wasn't the goal. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I completely get that. So, I mean, now that we're bringing it up,
(16:14):
that's part of the things I wanted to talk to you about.
So with allostatic load, so for everyone else, can you just explain that,
you know, in your own terms, like what it is? And yes, it's not a diagnosis.
It's just what happens physiologically with you, you know, when you're going
through trauma, whatever you're going through. Right. Yeah.
So normally our bodies are trying to manage all of the stressors that are kind
(16:39):
of bombarding us at once.
And it does that through learning.
I mean, our brains are prediction making machines and our bodies are trying
to manage energy and predict what's happening next to be as efficient as possible
and to manage all these stressors. Yeah. It's always doing this.
And that's how our nervous system is wired.
Yes. And it's a good thing. So our normal state of like kind of balancing all
(17:04):
of that is called allostasis.
So maintaining allostasis is kind of what we're all seeking,
you know, the ideal situation.
And then allostatic load is anything that's causing like putting a load on that
system. So a stressor really.
And we are really adaptable and we can handle a lot. And so our bodies are constantly
(17:24):
being pushed and pulled in different directions and we're kind of,
you know, bouncing back and managing energy and all of that.
So allostatic load is kind of a normal part of living.
And for most of us, we kind of get pushed or pulled in a direction.
You can think about it like a pendulum, even though it's more like three-dimensional.
But, you know, say you get pushed by a stressor and you swing out.
(17:45):
Ideally, you'd want your stress response system to kick in and come back to baseline.
And then you get hit again and you, and maybe you get hit twice and you kind
of bounce a little far, but like you have the ability to come back to baseline
to recover, regenerate, recuperate, all of those things, build up that energy
budget again for your body.
Most people in this profession, in the first responder profession,
(18:06):
and also in the military, what happens is there are so many different types
of stressors bombarding, you know, physical, environmental,
psychological, that you start to push somebody out.
And as they swing back, they get hit again. And then they swing back and they get hit again.
And that could be a traumatic brain injury, a lack of sleep. Yeah.
(18:27):
Illness, when your children are sick or you're potentially sick or financial
burdens, your career's in jeopardy, all these things keep pushing you out.
So it doesn't have to be just a physical stressor. The psychological ones also
impact the same. It's one system that we have.
So it keeps pushing people out. And when you get out here in this arena so far
from baseline, it's like leaving your air conditioner running in Death Valley
(18:51):
with all your windows and doors Yeah. Yeah.
So the wheels are going to come off the bus. Yeah.
You cannot operate that way.
Well, for an extended period of time, there's going to be breakdown.
There's going to be dysfunction.
And that's the point where people like operator syndrome.
Right. It's like you look at the list of symptoms and there's all these dysfunctional systems.
(19:13):
That's the point where you're having breakdown. And I see that in the first
responder community so much.
And in a first responder community, it breaks my heart even more because people
in law enforcement and fire service and EMTs, it's not as much of a norm to
talk about it like it is in the veteran community.
(19:33):
And I've found working with folks when I was living in Montana and now here, the stigmas are real.
And the barriers to opening up and talking are so much worse in these communities. Absolutely.
Yeah. The thing is, though, it's because it's our careers. Right. So so unfortunately.
(19:54):
The way it would work is the minute, I mean, it's just like anything.
Oh, anyone have any issues, you know, you raise your hand and all of a sudden
now you're out of work for however long.
And that could be a career ender. So, and a lot of guys and gals have this passion,
this drive in the first responder community that they can't let go,
or they think that they're not good at anything else because now my job just told me I'm no good.
(20:20):
So, so that's one of the reasons
of the stigma behind it and if
you think you know with with the overload i mean you're
talking you know like i work in a medium-sized city so
i could see maybe anywhere between one to five traumatic type scenarios you
know in in a week in the place that you live yeah in the place that that i work
(20:44):
and and in the place that you're gonna yeah you're gonna be driving past yeah
yeah yeah so versus Versus, you know, when I was at war in Iraq,
I'm not going to have the same reactions because I haven't been there in, you know, decades.
So over here, yeah, we drive by the same exact places where I could tell you
exactly where a kid died. I could tell you exactly.
(21:04):
You can't help but think about it. Yeah, exactly. And when you think about it,
like you said, over and over again, or you just dealt with, you know,
let's say an infant who's dead.
And then right away, you got to get right back out to work.
It doesn't matter, you know, because there's another call waiting for you.
And you go to another call and it turns out to be just a BS,
let's say property dispute.
(21:25):
Two neighbors just, well, 30 years ago, and this is like true story.
30 years ago, the guy before who bought this house placed his shed in the middle,
three inches over the property line. And now you have to remove it.
This is real. This is actually, it's like, really?
So, but anyway, so you deal with like that debt and then you go deal with these
(21:45):
two neighbors who are going at it.
Nine times out of 10, the cop is going to have this emotional response.
Like he's just going to be like, get the fuck out. Like, you know, you'll lose your mind.
Yeah. How can you care and have compassion for those two people bickering when
you just saw like a loss of life?
Yeah. You're like, the scale is not the same here. No. And that's the unfortunate
part I find in the profession is there is no downtime after dealing with something like that,
(22:10):
especially after homicide investigations and stuff like that,
where we were literally up almost, it felt like, 30,
40 hours straight in a homicide investigation.
And yeah, we'll take, you know, after the case is resolved and all that, everyone's arrested.
Yeah, we'll take a day or two, you know, maybe vacation or take a break.
But even then, there's no time because you still have stuff you got to do on
(22:31):
the front and back end of this homicide, even though you arrested everybody.
But now you got more paperwork you got to do. You're talking to the lawyers,
you're talking to the courts. And so you're never done.
You know, like one of my cases, a real bad, you know, sex crime against a child.
And I had to work on that case for two and a half years so for two
and a half years i had to read through the notes i had to read through
(22:53):
the reports i had to look at the dna evidence
and i had to so so you know you can't like you said
though you know but that pendulum every time it hits
and then you get something else and then you get something else and eventually
in the first robotic community they break you know we break i mean because it's
just one thing after another after another and it never ends so i could totally
(23:14):
see how this overload that you describe really get to the first responder community.
I was talking to a close friend of mine, he's a Green Beret.
And he says, in his opinion,
he said, law enforcement is the equivalent to like a Green Beret because very
unconventional methods of dealing with the crowd, dealing with people,
(23:37):
and you're out there patrolling and doing whatever you're doing.
And he says, he kind of equates it to that. Yeah.
Because you're dealing with people.
Exactly. You're supposed to be compassionate all the time. Exactly.
And it makes it very, very tough. And, you know, with.
You know, building resilience within, you know, one thing I want to talk about
(23:58):
is kind of not so much the building resilience, but kind of the neurophysiological
science behind the stress and trauma.
Like, you know, when you're in that state of stress, right?
Let's say you dealt with a bad car accident, three, four people really injured.
Or actually, I'll give you a real one. I went to a, I went to,
I was the kind of incident command for a mass casualty type incident where a
(24:22):
car drove right into a building and hit a bunch of people.
So dealing with that and, you know, I was one of the first ones to show up.
The first two officers showed up. I mean, everyone did a phenomenal job, right?
Because you had, you know, for me, I was more like, all right,
who's the most wounded? Who's this? Who's that? And the fire department showed
up. So it was a lot going on.
And with that sort of, we'll call it stress and trauma, right?
(24:45):
Physiologically, what would be happening with me as I'm seeing all this stuff?
Because I know how I am. On mission, I ignore everything.
I'm on a mission. I got to do this, do this, do this, do this.
But then for me, it's always after.
We get that adrenaline dump or all of a sudden, I'm tired. I just want to sleep for three days.
So if you can just kind of go over a little bit about that. Yeah.
(25:06):
And it depends on the person, right?
Because some people get into these high stress, potentially traumatic situations,
and they get fully activated and they shine and they just like compartmentalize and motor through it.
And other people are completely debilitated from the get go.
So it does a little bit depend on, you know, the kind of person that you are,
(25:26):
but generally speaking, going into something like this, you know,
I like to talk about stress in terms of like physiology and body systems and
all of that. And so like, as you're.
Preparing to go in and deal with something that's potentially traumatic,
you know, you have your stress response system is kicking on already.
You've got activation of your sympathetic nervous system, which is the technically
(25:48):
the fight or flight kind of more activating side of things, which is turned
on to prepare the body for mobilization.
So, you know, you're, you're mobilizing glucose stores in your body.
You're, you're preparing to expend energy.
You're, you're you're potentially enhancing focus.
If your stress hormones like epinephrine,
(26:08):
norepinephrine, cortisol get too high, it can flood the system.
And that's where people end up kind of dissociating or instead of being hyper-focused,
like if you drank some caffeine and you're ready to go, it almost becomes something
where they can dissociate or they have a impairment of memory.
Is that that amygdala hijack type? Yeah, it's kind of like that, yeah. Yeah.
(26:30):
And you see this in certain people who are maybe predisposed to it.
There's correlations around which type of person may be which,
but again, it comes down to individual factors, training, all those things.
But you have essentially activation of these systems, maybe heightened,
I mean, certainly heightened arousal, but maybe heightened attention as well.
So it can go in either direction, but ideally you would have this activation
(26:55):
and preparation to be able to deal with what you're dealing with.
Now, when you see what's going on and you have visual input from maybe something
that's horrific, emotions start to kick in.
And for most people who have been well-trained and exposed to a lot of these
types of things, they've become very good at compartmentalizing.
So in that moment, there's this information, there's maybe a split second of
(27:19):
emotion that you realize if
you let yourself go there, that you're not gonna be able to do your job.
So you feel it and then you shut it down and you compartmentalize,
you put whatever that is in a box up on a shelf in your brain and you just keep moving forward.
And unfortunately, this is the kind of profession that demands that.
It's not maybe normal to do every day of your life, right?
(27:45):
It's a survival strategy. It's very effective and I'm glad we have it because we need Yeah.
Well, I just think of like our primal days. Yeah, we had it because when a saber-toothed
tiger was chasing us, that's something we needed, but not on a daily basis of
running into the fire, we'll say, so to speak.
Totally. Yeah. So, well, and with that analogy, right? Like it made sense to
(28:06):
mobilize for physical things, but like emotional stress activates the same system
and it's like you're being chased by the saber-toothed tiger.
But in reality, you're just thinking about your ex or your finances or something,
right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The compartmentalization thing is really important, but I think what happens
in this profession, in the first responder profession especially,
(28:28):
and military for sure, is that you have to do it so frequently.
And with the first responder community, like you said, you don't have that downtime
where you're not on anymore.
On deployments, you've got to extend it over the period of deployment.
When you come home, there may be other things that you have to deal with,
but you're not at risk of getting shot at.
(28:52):
It's a different scenario. So you do have a little bit of that downtime to recover.
With the first responder community, you might have a day or two.
If you take a vacation, it's maybe a week. You don't really have a lot of time to recover.
So you're pretty much putting things in boxes on shelves every day.
Yeah. And we have the capacity to hold a lot, but at some point with the stressors
(29:16):
we were talking about before and your pendulum,
you know, this allostasis getting to the point of being pushed into allostatic overload. Yeah.
That's where our ability to manage everything starts to fall apart.
And so now I, the analogy I like to give is like, you try to put another box
on the shelf and in the process, because it's so full,
(29:36):
you knock a bunch off and now you're driving down the street to go get groceries
and you start bawling out of nowhere. And you don't like, I don't even know
where that's coming from.
Or you just get angry, you have rage, and you don't understand.
You know, it's like, I had a client that was telling me, and I love this,
I hope he listens to this podcast, because if he ever hears this story,
he's gonna be like, that was me.
(29:57):
But he told me this story, and I say it all the time, because it's hilarious,
but also very real, that he was in this point of allostatic overload,
knocking boxes off of shelves, his physical function wasn't great.
I was just dealing with a lot. And you know those chip bags where they have
like a, you can tear off the top.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like pre-torn, but there's a zipper.
(30:17):
Yeah, yeah. So you tear off the top and then the zipper's there.
You eat chips and you zip it back up, right?
Well, his wife cut below the zipper. Oh. And he was like, why would you do that?
You know, like he just couldn't. He blew up. He lost it when he saw what she
did. He just lost it. Yeah.
It's a minor thing, right? Like this is not something to like,
this is not a hill you want to die on. But in that moment, he couldn't,
(30:41):
it was for him and his defense, what was going on for him physiologically was
she wasn't paying attention.
She's a liability. This is a risk. If she's not paying attention to detail,
this could get somebody killed. That's actually makes sense to me.
You know, right. It makes sense because it's those checks, the boxes that we
(31:02):
check when we're running ops and doing all these things is, yeah, that's funny.
Funny that that's what I always tell like brand new cops on the job,
pay attention, the smallest detail could save your life or could kill you like
if you miss it. So yeah, I could totally see how.
But again, like you said though, when he's been compartmentalizing over and
over and over and then that little minor thing, because it happens to me too
(31:24):
with my son sometimes where it's just a minor thing.
I get it and I blow up and my wife gives me the look and-
Then it turns into, yeah, let's go at it. But it does make a lot of sense that
over the course of a week,
again, one to five traumatic things, and then finally the littlest thing just sets me right off.
(31:46):
And like you said, it makes perfect sense.
So in terms of training that resilience inside a department,
I can tell you that law enforcement does a piss poor job.
There is no training other Other than if you're on a specialty unit like SWAT,
like I am, we train for force on force and all kinds of different scenarios
(32:08):
and all kinds of different things. And we do a lot of stress shoots.
So we get that arousal up and it's kind of like the inverted U theory, right?
Where we concentrate on a task or skill over and over and over and over.
Just like I say in the military when we're doing room clearing,
we'll do that till we throw up. It gets so boring, but there's a reason behind it, right?
(32:31):
There's a reason why we will battle drills, right? Battle drills,
battle over and over and over again.
It's that way when that arousal happens, we hit that peak performance.
And that's like you said, for me, it's kind of funny. I wear a heart rate monitor.
So when I'm doing like an op or anything intense at work, I love to see where I was, where I'm at.
(32:52):
Matt, because again, I don't really, I can't really tell if my heart rate spikes
or whatever in the moment, but sure enough, you'll see like my heart rate will spike to 170, 175.
And as I'm in the situation, it starts to drop because I've been trained and
conditioned to be able to operate in that environment.
Then on the flip side, I'm like, yeah, but if you throw a snake in front of
(33:14):
me, I'll scream like a girl and I'll run up 10 miles the other direction.
But the thing is, in the law, like I said, they're not training the officers for any of that.
So in the academy, we never talked about amygdala hijack.
We never talked about the importance of checking yourself or mentally checking yourself and stuff.
(33:36):
And, and I think, you know, that's why I think you have a lot of these cops
that are walking, talking disasters because they don't know.
Yeah. Right. They don't know what's going on. They weren't prepared well to
deal with the stressors of the profession.
No. And it's not, I mean, everybody needs to take responsibility for themselves,
but when you don't know, it's not your fault really.
(33:58):
I mean, there's, there's, everybody needs to like hire up,
you know, through administration needs to do a better job of bringing trainings
in and creating more opportunities for that kind of thing to help people because,
because it is, it's really important.
It's, it's really important for the individual human who is the law enforcement officer, right?
(34:21):
Yeah. Who is a human being. Let's remember that. Yeah. Yeah. People forget.
I know. No, it's important for their well-being, but it's important for the
investment of the organization, the money they've put into training that person.
But it's important for the people that they're interacting with.
You know, I mean, it's of critical importance to be able to train people well
(34:41):
and to help them and set them up for success and to deal with these things that are very...
Very real physiological issues and psychological issues that we understand and
can put things into place to deal with.
But even the compartmentalization piece, I mean, there needs to be some room
for people to downregulate, to process what they experienced,
(35:05):
whether it's a peer support specialist or they need to just go out in nature
and do their thing for a little while and process it the way that they process things.
I mean, people need that, that room because when you just keep shoving stuff
down, putting things on boxes, I mean, there's, there's going to be a blow off valve at some point.
And that's, you know, that's, that's maybe an indicator that you're at that
(35:26):
point. That's the thing.
Like, like with me, like I, I love doing ARs with my guys and gals after a critical incident.
We'll do a quick, you know, quick AR in the morning, you know, the next day.
That way, you know, guys think about whatever and we'll just kind of hash through
the AR and, and leave it at that.
And I always, you know, no matter what, I always recommend to all the officers,
(35:46):
hey, go, if you need help, seek help. Like there's nothing wrong with it.
And that shows more strength than weakness, you know, and, and I always say that.
And, you know, for one thing is also another factor that I see,
not just, you know, with the stress and trauma, but also burnout in the law
enforcement and first responder communities.
Because I was reading a study, actually, from the Journal of Police and Criminal
(36:10):
Psychology, up to 90% of police officers experience symptoms of burnout at some point in their careers.
So, like I work in a city, burnout rate is much higher for people that work
in a city because the demands are so much on a city and we're always understaffed.
We'll never be, you know, you're never fully staffed. And the same study found
(36:31):
that nearly one in five police officers meet the diagnostic criteria of full-blown burnout. So, yeah.
Those officers, all of us, you know, officers that are out there where we're
working 16 to 20 hour days even, and then going home to sleep for four,
five, six hours, that's not nearly enough rest. No, it's an unwinnable situation.
(36:52):
Exactly. And I've read a study, I forget where, but I read a study saying that,
you know, that sort of schedule that law enforcement has and you're working, it's equivalent to,
I think they said like a BAC level of 0.1 something. thing like this, you're drunk.
Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. And I don't, I don't think people understand this.
Like it's really like that, that does matter.
(37:15):
And it, it, the going back to allostasis, like that lack of sleep,
all those stressors impact your ability to stay centered.
And that, you know, I was kind of referencing some work done by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
She has this theory, the theory of constructed emotion and affective realism,
but she talks about police officers and law enforcement officers and how these
(37:39):
demands and ultimately the affective state that they're in colors their perception.
So for example, they did studies looking at law enforcement officers and perturbing
them in different ways, basically trying to get them to experience different types of emotions.
And then from that, be exposed to like a specific scenario That would maybe
(38:03):
be a person holding a weapon or something like that.
The way our brain works, it's again, going back to what I mentioned earlier,
it's a prediction making machine. So it fills in the blank.
And if a scenario based off of previous experience, whether it's really real
experience you've had, things you've heard of, something you watched on TV.
Your brain is making predictions to be ready to anticipate what to do next.
(38:27):
So it can fill in something that looks like a gun to a person.
Their perception was that that person was holding a weapon when they really
weren't. And everything that that person experienced prior to that moment is
playing into that person's perception of that moment. That's interesting.
So I read this book, Left of Bang. They talk about perception.
(38:51):
And I've kind of really dug and started looking research into people's perception
and how when you watch a use of force type video and one cop shoots and the
other one didn't, it's because, again,
to me, body cams do not give you the officer's perspective or perception.
They're just showing you what is just a visual representation of what happened,
(39:15):
not what was actually going on in here.
And there was a, there was one case that was done, I don't know if you've heard for science.
Yeah, they do a lot of studies and stuff, yeah, on law enforcement.
And they were sharing this case that they worked where an officer was dark and,
like, you know, even through the body cam, what appeared to be the guy holding
(39:35):
what looked like a firearm.
And what Force9 did is they do a great job of recreating all the things that led to the shooting.
And through their analysis, what it turned out to be, the guy was holding a
cell phone, kind of like a gun. But he was in like a dark corner of the backyard.
And even though that the body cam enhanced the image, and you could clearly
(40:00):
see it wasn't really a firearm, but the stance the guy took made it perception
of the officer, oh, shoot, this guy just drew a gun. I need to fire back.
So it's interesting you bring that up about that perception.
Yeah, it's like the affective state or how you feel about how you feel,
essentially, really plays into this.
And that's where you're asking officers to make split-second decisions on lack
(40:24):
of sleep and all these other stressors.
And that's where I think training has a place to be adaptable for this specific thing,
because I think if people could train in scenarios that put them in different
affective states when they're happy, when they're tired, when they're angry,
when they're depressed, when they're, you know, like if you can get people to
(40:47):
like do it in all those different ways.
So that way when they show up to do the job and they're in that state,
they've trained well enough to know that maybe there, there is that ability
to take that extra second and, and realize like.
Again, your brain is kind of filling in the blanks here, but if there's any
way to insert a pause and allow somebody to really take a breath,
(41:12):
again, sometimes it's a very split second decision.
You don't have a second, you know? So I, I'm not trying to solve the problem.
It's far more complex, but I want to introduce that for people to,
to contemplate because it is important.
And the same thing with like affective states, you make really,
you make totally different decisions when you're feeling, you know,
maybe a little down versus happy.
(41:34):
And there's tons of research on this. So this isn't earth shattering stuff,
but it is important because the more we get to know ourselves and when we're
in a specific type of mood or feeling a specific kind of way,
we know, oh, I'm in that place.
I'm feeling this way. I'm probably going to make decisions this way.
(41:54):
And maybe I shouldn't be making decisions right now.
That is also very valuable. So that's the thing. We like to,
what's called like a mental health day where we'll just not come to work.
We'll call it a mental health day and we'll just relax because there are days,
I mean, every cop feels it. There are days where you're like,
you know what, I'm not feeling it. I'm staying home.
This is not, you know, and, you know, we'll call it a mental health day.
(42:15):
It's really take a sick day, quote unquote.
And you're just like, just stay home and just relax. Because to me,
you know, I've had officers show up to work with only like maybe two hours of sleep.
It's because of personal stressors, right?
Kid's sick. This is sick. This, this, you know, dog wasn't feeling well.
So I had to take it to the ER.
You know, I was up till four and I have to be at work at eight.
(42:36):
So by the time I got home and I literally tell the officer, I'm like,
why did you come in then, man? You're not ready.
You know, so what I ended up doing for one officer is I put the officer like
on a whole, like on, on the other end, like just like.
Go hide. If we need you, we'll call you. Because to me, that's more of a liability,
quote unquote, not just to the officer themselves, but also to the partners
(43:00):
and to the community too, because you're not thinking.
Your mind is just exhausted by all the other things that have been going on in your life.
And you're basically tired.
And speaking of, you're saying training and
scenarios and stuff like that is that's one thing that that
i've always pushed is scenario-based training
(43:22):
and you know i bring back to like you know when i was in basic where they give
you your rifle for the first time and whether it's cold snow and rain in middle
of the night it doesn't matter you're going to be training with it they don't
care if they wake you up at two in the morning you better be able to take it
apart put it together or you better have your serial number memorized and all that.
But all those things you put together though, builds that automatic system where
(43:47):
now you're not even really thinking about it because you've rehearsed it so
much, whether you're tired, wet, hungry, you just go do it.
So that's one thing where I've been really trying to push realistic simulated
scenarios, stress exposure training.
That way officers have some idea when they step into an active shooter,
(44:08):
what they're actually going to be feeling, right?
Some sort of, you know, you build it, right?
I mean, I always tell the story of, you know, when one of my guys I knew out
in Iraq got blown up and killed by an IED, my body went into automatic mode
when I was switching the radio freaks to talk to the air support and everybody else.
But because it's been rehearsed so much that it didn't really take a lot of
(44:32):
what we'll call brain power to do it because I just do do.
Pushed buttons, turned a couple dials, and I was dialed in. I was good to go.
But you always see these officers, like I'll hear it over the radio.
They're going to a call, and they're screaming into the radio because they're
in that panicked state. And you're like, oh, Jesus.
You're like, oh, boy. You know, it's going to be a disaster.
(44:55):
So within each agency, I'd say, unfortunately, there's not that training,
especially in the patrol division.
They don't get that training. No, I know. And the level of training is not enough for people.
And people expect, I mean, it's like the general public expects law enforcement
officers to be perfect. And they're human.
(45:15):
And many don't get the training that you've had. And I think expectations are
unrealistic for what the reality is of what we're giving officers.
And officers need more training. And I think that's a whole other conversation
about that. Don't get me started on that. Yeah.
Well, I mean, I write for Havoc Journal a lot, and most of my articles kind
(45:38):
of revolve around the idea behind how training just sucks for law enforcement.
Unless you're in a specialty unit like bomb squad or whatever else,
unless you're doing any of those things, you're not getting the right training.
You're not getting the training you need.
I mean, I know patrol officers or agencies that the only training their cops
get is the academy, and that's it.
(45:59):
And maybe they'll go shoot at the range once or twice a year.
And that's it. And I'm not setting people up. No, no.
And to me, it's like, you're just shoveling and pushing people out the door,
you know, here's a badge and a gun and go forth and, you know,
hope you do some good, kind of like a hope and a prayer, you know?
So it's like, it's like, it's, it's so frustrating. It breaks my heart for,
(46:21):
for everybody involved.
You know, it's just, it's, yeah, it's not a, it's no, it's not.
And And, you know, there's times where I've hit that.
You know load where i tried to stay as in tune as
i can with with my body and my mind because just over the
years of learning and kind of just me being
(46:41):
a nerd and interested in all those things you know so but it
really kind of taught me a lot about myself where i can you know the next day
or the day after if i go through something and i'm extremely tired i'm like
i know what that's from that's from x but one day i i did not realize so i i
you know we had a training down in connecticut at the range with the SWAT team.
(47:02):
And I'll never forget, I was in the car driving and I just broke down.
And two days prior, I almost shot and killed somebody because it was a really,
really bad dude that would have worn out for his arrest.
He's like a gang enforcer, street level type guy, but really, really bad.
And his threat matrix was off the charts. And I was an assistant team leader.
(47:23):
So me and the team leader, commander, we set up the whole op and putting all the plans together.
So you're talking maybe we worked on it for like two weeks prior to the date
of doing it and all the intel we're getting and everything and putting it together.
So you have all those stressors coming together.
And then the day of the op, I'll never forget, it was a Boston cop.
(47:44):
We were helping them. It was a huge roundup of gangs. It was like one of the
massive ops. Yeah. It was like multiple SWAT teams involved.
It was during COVID when one of
the good idea if Harry's hit the district attorney's
office and we're like well let's release some of the jail
because that way whatever and they picked the worst type of
people to release not your yeah not your you know stole something and yeah you
(48:09):
know what yeah you can go you know what I mean so so they picked the worst of
the worst let them go and they put GPS money like okay that's gonna really help
but anyway so before I get into that part but so you know we we did the whole
planning and everything.
And I remember that day. So that morning, early morning, we were going through
the op, briefing the rest of the team of what we want, kind of expectations
(48:32):
and who this guy is and what, all the things.
And I'll never forget a Boston cop, usually the detectives, they'll have a thing
ready for them, kind of their final brief, I guess, the detectives where I'll
say, hey, detective, anything I missed?
And they'll stand up and usually it's no, or if they have something extra they'll
(48:52):
they'll they'll give us but the one thing this detective said was.
Just so you know, the district attorney is looking to screw a cop over. So be careful.
I'm like, great. And I'm number one through the door because I had a big rifle
shield, 50-pound shield.
So I'm like, I'm going to be the guy who's going to shoot this dude,
and I'm going to end up in jail because this district attorney, whatever.
(49:16):
And our percentage, I think, at the time for a shootout with this guy was close to 97%.
He was that bad. that's why we decided to take a big shield with us and like
yeah you know just in case and i remember we did the entry it was early morning
did the entry went right to his mom's basement granted of course it was a mom's
basement goes right in mom's basement he was he ducks out of his bedroom
(49:40):
i'm going with the rest of the team behind me and i'll
never forget he was reaching to his bed i went in the room he was reaching his
bed i had my gun right there there was it was a clock that he
was going for and i kept telling him don't do it i'm
squeezing the trigger and he's like oh you know he gave
up so it was a near like i almost all i
needed was maybe another half pound pressure and see you later but two
(50:00):
days later that's when you know driving broke down i'm like what the hell is
that from but i faulted myself because i didn't work on it because i was because
again as a team lead you're like you know it's just team lead my mind was on
the other guys and everything else you know exactly you know even after the
arrest and making sure the guys are good and everyone's good and everyone's that.
And I'll show you pictures later with a news guy.
(50:23):
He's a buddy of mine. He does like photography for the news.
He took a bunch of pictures. I'm like, you asshole.
But I'll show you the pictures of it. It was interesting, my posture, how I was.
And I'm like, oh yeah, that's definitely the stress I'm trying to relieve.
Because you can see I'm stretching. I'm doing like...
Things that intuitively yeah intuitively i'm not
even realizing i'm doing it so so and
(50:43):
again like i faulted myself because i didn't really work on myself
after that i didn't realize how what was
going on in my head at the time but sometimes you don't
know how it's gonna hit yeah you know like i mean sometimes
like i talked to lots of friends in
the military and they had lots of experiences in combat and
shooting and killing people and sometimes it was no issue
(51:05):
and other times it was like that one that one
instance and they couldn't have known or predicted that
why that one time versus another really affected them and and it's challenging
and sometimes you don't know until it like crops up later but one thing people
don't understand though about really high stress and potentially traumatic situations
is that post-traumatic stress is normal following an experience like that.
(51:31):
It's your body saying, wow, we almost died or that was really a close call.
I should maybe be a little bit more alert for a while in case this happens again,
right? It's a normal survival instinct.
Now over time, that post-traumatic stress subsides, you realize you're safe.
It's in the past, the event happened and it's no longer happening.
And you kind of go back to a baseline and feeling better and moving through life normally again,
(51:56):
whatever your normal is and for some
people it just gets stuck in that on position
and that's then what goes on to become post-traumatic
stress disorder yeah but but for most people that initial phase of stress hypervigilance
inability to sleep maybe nightmares and some flashbacks initially early on inexplicable
(52:18):
emotion all of that stuff can
be part of your body kind of processing and letting go of what happened.
But again, there's a lot that, you know, for some people just continues.
And there's just so much we don't understand about this too.
You know, I'm talking about a lot of these things that are the theories that we have.
When it comes to neuroscience and humans and psychology, we can't open someone's
(52:42):
head and know exactly what's happening.
So, you know, this is basing a lot of, you know, a lot of things on theory.
Yeah. Theories that make sense, but also everybody's a little different,
you know? Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, we've had one officer who ended up quitting right after a homicide.
You know, that officer could not handle it. Completely broke down.
(53:02):
It was still brand new to the job.
And as soon as they witnessed, I mean, it was, it was quite the crazy scene,
but it was enough for that officer to say, you know what, I'm all set,
you know, and, and which commend them for that because might as well get it
early on versus deciding to, you know, toughen it up and toughen out and,
you know, let it creep up another time.
(53:23):
But yeah, everyone's designed, I guess, built differently.
I don't know if you find this, but within the law enforcement community,
the combat veteran seems to be a little more resilient than your average civilian
police officer, just because I think just from the stuff we've done. Totally.
And a lot of people who are drawn to the military profession in general are
(53:44):
already a little bit sturdier.
I thought you were going to say crazier. I'm like, yeah, that's true too.
Resilient is maybe another way to put it.
And I mean that in a way, you know, this is definitely applicable to the soft community for sure.
But I think the military at large as well, you see a lot of people who come
from really difficult upbringings. You see a lot of adverse childhood experiences.
(54:07):
And you see a lot of people who end up being able to shoulder a lot more stress
later in life. Now, this doesn't mean that they're superhuman,
because as I described, physiology is physiology, right?
So just because somebody had a rough childhood and is able to shoulder more
stress doesn't mean that it's not going to come back to affect them later in life, right? Yeah.
(54:29):
Pay attention to that stuff. None of us are superhuman. Some of us are able
to handle a lot more than others.
And God bless those people because we need them. But also, it can come at a
cost for that person eventually.
Well, yeah, that's the thing that, yes, we need people like that because it's
an unthankless job, unforgiving job.
(54:50):
I think what agencies need to do is invest in their people.
Yeah. And that's the biggest thing. And usually Usually with cities,
I always see it with the city council, whatever.
Well, what is it going to cost? And what, you know, to them,
it's all the money. And that's the whole defund the police. Yeah.
You know, all that bullshit. Yeah. I mean, seriously.
Yeah. It destroyed the profession even more than it. The professions already destroyed.
(55:13):
But it really, really hurt the profession even more. And now,
you know, I say we're like maybe 30 years, 40 years back versus where we should
be now with all these different movements and all that stuff.
But I digress before I get into that part.
But so being respectful, respectful of your timing, I know you drove all the
(55:36):
way out here and we're in the 22 Mohawks headquarters. Yes, which is awesome.
Yeah. And, you know, if there was something, you know, we like to ask this for
everybody that comes on the show.
If there's one thing you would want, like advice to police officer or firefighter,
military veteran, if something that they should do to make themselves that much
(55:57):
better, what would it be?
That is a great question.
I would say to not be hesitant or afraid to invest in yourself.
I know a lot of people get into these professions because they want to serve
(56:18):
and they often put themselves last,
but for you to be the best version of yourself at that job, but then also to
be the best version of yourself to your family and your friends and all of that,
the time it takes to take care of yourself, to learn about your,
like paying attention to why you do things, your patterns, utilizing tools,
(56:41):
whatever they may be to move through things and And to recover well,
whether it's physical or psychological injuries, visible, invisible,
whatever it is, putting that time in to take care of yourself,
I think, is critical because we need people who are healthy.
Is achieving optimal wellness, who are also serving their communities and their country.
(57:03):
And everybody is a human being at the end of the day and deserves that.
Yeah. Thank you very much. And yeah, that's a huge reminder to everybody. We are all human.
And, you know, with being human comes at a cost when we're dealing with situations,
whether it was 20 years of GWAT or every day putting your vest on and going
(57:24):
out the door to maybe could be the last day you see your kids or could,
you know, it's, it's, you know, you, you always have those things in the back
of your mind when you walk out that door.
But for those types of people that walk out that door, I mean,
it's, it takes just courage and bravery alone just to be able to do it.
So taking care of yourself, that's a huge, great advice, um,
(57:47):
because can't stress that enough.
Uh, but Kate, thank you so much for coming. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, like that first in-person interview over at, you know, inside 22 Mohawks HQ.
So everybody out there, stay safe and stay sapient.
Music.
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