Good Life Project - How Do You Live After You’ve Almost Died?

Episode Date: February 4, 2015

"PTSD is less of a brain event than an existential event."We've all heard of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but we may not realize that we probably all know someone who suffers from it.While it is typically associated with war and soldiers coming home after combat, trauma is a big part of civilian life.Today's guest has a fascinating perspective on this as he served for four years on active Marine duty, in the most peaceful of times, but then voluntarily went into war zones as a war reporter after his service.What he learned from his own experiences with PTSD, as well as his subsequent digging into the research and experiences around it, resulted in his new book, The Evil Hours.In our conversation, we cover all facets of trauma, David's experiences, and the underlying psychology behind the behaviors we are seeing more of in this country.He explains the fantasy soldiers create in their minds about coming home (and how difficult it is to reconcile reality with that once they are back), why Americans especially struggle with PTSD, and the idea of coming home as a Joseph Campbell-esque heroic journey that many never finish.One of the most helpful points he makes, which each of us can apply, is the idea that you have to re-invent yourself after trauma, and creating community around that new identity is essential.Whether you've experienced trauma yourself or are close to someone who has, David Morris shares a powerful story to better understand what trauma can teach us about ourselves.Contact David and learn more about his workWebsite"What you arrive with in the war is as important as what happens to you."Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

That kind of is one of the, I think, central intellectual issues at the heart of PTSD is how do you live? How do you live after you've almost died? It's kind of fitting that as I'm recording this short introduction, there are sirens in the background. I'm sitting in New York City, but today's conversation is about PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. It's a conversation with a guy named David Morris, who wrote a book called The Evil Hours, which is a fascinating exploration. And he served first as a Marine and didn't see combat, but then he chose to go back into combat zones as a war journalist. And at that point, he was exposed to some pretty profound and life-changing trauma. And he came home and struggled with it mightily,

as many veterans do, and really turned his journalistic inquiry into trying to figure this out. And looking at the whole world of how we deal with, how we work with, how we interact with people who are living with this thing called PTSD and how it profoundly changes you and may never leave you and how the institutions and the therapies that are set up for it may or may not do much good. Some may even potentially do harm and how we should approach it. And also how we can support people who maybe are friends of ours or who we love who've gone through this. The other thing that's really important about this conversation is this is not just about veterans.

This is about people that you know every day in your life. Almost guaranteed that if you're living and breathing on the planet for more than a few decades, there's somebody who's gone through some level of trauma that has left them in some way wounded. And how do we live with that? How do we move through it? How do we heal it if it's in fact it's possible? That's what this conversation is all about. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered. Summer runs or playoff season meditations, whatever your vibe, Peloton has thousands of classes built to push you. We know how life goes.

New father, new routines, new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a challenge or rest. And Peloton has everything you need, whenever you need it. Find your push. Find your power And Peloton has everything you need, whenever you need it. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. So, fascinating topic and really interesting timing. I want to take a step back before we really kind of go into what it's about, though, and learn just a little bit more about you and sort of like take it all the way back. So, you grew up in Southern California.

Yes. And like military military background all that yeah um well i came i grew it's i grew up in the 1980s in southern california and san diego specifically kind of in reagan's it felt like reagan's america when i was there and most of california's sort of you know has a certain image of being you know liberal and you know eclectic. But the corner of California I grew up in was very military. My dad was a Vietnam vet, and I grew up just a few miles from the Miramar Air Station at the time.

And Top Gun was there, so all of my neighbors, including my father, were all Vietnam veterans. So I felt like I grew up kind of in the shadow of the Vietnam War. In your mind, were you always like, okay, this is going to be my path or was it something where you. Kind of, yeah. It's sort of interesting. I was very, um, I grew up one of the most powerful experiences for me growing up. Um, and I, and I didn't know that this was unusual, you know, until later until I went to school, but I grew up going to the Miramar Air Show. And that was a big, and seeing the airplanes, and there's nothing more exciting to a nine-year-old boy

than a fighter aircraft, a jet fighter aircraft. So that, I was very, at a very young age, was just sort of immersed in military hardware and all the military toys that, you know, all the toys that the military has. And so that was, you know, and you can see that in other, like in anime and other, that American military hardware culture kind of transmogrifies itself and grafts itself into other cultures.

So it's not just an American thing, but it was interesting for me that the romance of military technology was one of the first things. That was one of my first loves growing up. I could tell you everything, all of the specifications of an F-14 Tomcat, an F-18 Hornet, all that stuff was just my brain, was just like a super sponge for all that kind of data. Yeah. Was that also something that was sort of like a bonding point

between you and your dad, because he was former military? Yeah, sort of. I mean, my dad sort of was a bonding point between you and your dad because he was former military yeah sort of i mean my dad sort of a slightly different my dad was a navy vietnam veteran and he'd served uh he was a supply officer he had like a really safe job but landed was in vietnam briefly um and so he had an experience he had something he had that connection and that mystery that um and if you look at so many military people and this holds holds true for women and men that serve in the military, is there is this relationship. And you see this in Shakespeare and you see this in George W. Bush as well. your father served and the idea of him being a veteran or even uncle or another

father figure being a veteran plays a really huge, almost outsized role in the imagination of a young man and the imagination of someone who goes in the military. And in terms of PTSD, they find people in terms of diagnostic likelihood that you're going to be diagnosed with PTSD. One of the criteria that comes up, you know, on kind of a deeper level when you dig into it is what sort of relationship did the soldier have with their father? And so, and in some cases where there's a really poor one or a troubled or conflicted one there, it's more likely, which is really interesting when you think

about it, because there's something, and you see this in Shakespeare and Henry IV, Part I, where Prince Hal is trying to live up to the responsibilities of adulthood and the responsibilities of adult military leadership, and that kind of, and he acts out, and he's misbehaving in the first part of the play, and then later kind of grows into the role in Henry V, and he becomes a military leader. And so there is this just sort of, you know, wrestling with male roles and male archetypes and male energies, because war is a very male energy place. And the stuff you bring when you arrive, in terms of how PTSD works, what you arrive with in the war and what you arrive with in the military is as important as what happens to you. Right.

If that makes sense. From an epidemiological standpoint, your predisposing factors are as important as what happens to you once you're in the war. Yeah, and I definitely want to circle back to that because it actually opens up a whole bunch of questions for me right away. In terms of how much is environment, how much is genetics. But before we get there, let's kind of fill in the puzzle, the story a little bit, too. So at some point, you actually decided to join the military. Yeah, and as you alluded to earlier, for me, very early on, I was interested in the military. It was something that was a part of my growing up.

But my brother didn't go in. He's only 18 months older than me. And I think something happened. I got interested, and it put the hook in me. And so when I began looking at places to go to college, I selected a school that had the biggest and most wide-ranging ROTC program. I went to college in Texas, Texas A&M, because wide ranging ROTC program. I went to college in Texas because of

their Texas A&M because of the ROTC program there. So it was very much a part of my decision making of how I wanted to, you know, how, what kind of career I wanted to have. So it was, it was, you know, not only did I, it was a raise in that environment, but that was something that, that I perceived as being the organizing principle for my, for my adult life, for my career. Yeah. So then you chose to be a Marine. Yes. And there was something, I grew up backpacking a lot and from a real outdoorsy family, and there was something about the physical challenge and what the Marine Corps represented compared to all the other services.

The Marine Corps to me was like ancient sparta or something or some sort of samurai ideal and my other friends who went in first sort of convinced you know convinced me of this was that i that um to be a marine and to go into the marine corps was like the ultimate way to serve it was more committing it was a pure life it was a pure existence and it was somehow it was something that it was a pure life it was a pure existence and it was somehow it was something that transcended the idea of even kind of the military as a as a enlistment or uh you know as a job kind of thing it was a i looked at it as like a calling and it was this very to me it was it had this very transcendent warrior ideal appeal to it, if that makes sense.

Which is interesting, too, because we were in a period of, I'm trying to remember the timing here, of relative peace when you were actually in. Yeah, I served in the Marine Corps from 1994 to 1998, probably the most peaceful time in Marine Corps history. Nothing happened. Right. So where were you actually? And you were stationed in O'Reilly?

Well, I was stationed, I did my basic training at Quantico, Virginia, where all Marine officers train, and then went to Camp Pendleton for three years, and then did one six-month deployment to Okinawa, Japan. So pretty much the safest, most basic, you know, enlistment that you could serve, that you could hope to have, was what I had. But the training was really tough. There was a lot of, you know, um, a lot of attrition and a lot of guys didn't, that started the training, they didn't finish. Um, and it was, you know, the training was super hard. It's hard to fully describe the, how arduous it was, but, um, you know, very, you know, it was a year solid of training. So it was very, you know, very taxing. Yeah. I have a cousin of mine actually was in the Marines, actually served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And he was at one point sort of describing the process of, you know, the early days of being in it. It sounds like absolutely brutal. Yeah. And that's one thing I think like Full Metal Jacket, one of the better movies about the Marine Corps, actually captures really well is there is, and this sort of fits into the,

the larger picture of PTSD, PTSD in some level, in some ways is a failure to come home and a failure to become a civilian again. And, uh, and sometimes for Marines that can be harder because, and you see that in the,

at the beginning sequence is a full metal jacket, which shows the bootcamp process. And it shows one of the major, uh, goals of Marine training is to de metal jacket, which shows the bootcamp process. And it shows one of the major goals of Marine training is to dehumanize you in a sense, and to turn you into someone who can kill another person, which is a kind of a brutalizing process. In some ways, you're training someone, um, basically to overcome and ignore some pretty basic human instincts, which is to not harm other people and to not kill other people. And so that, you know, that brutalizing,

that primitivizing in some ways, which has a really high social value and social goal. You are a protector kind of person, but that does have psychic costs and psychic, that's a process that you have to manage as you, and the U.Ss military does nothing basically to help people um re-acculturate after the military and after the wartime experience right that makes sense so so you come off of your tour and then um but then instead of saying okay i'm just gonna go back to regular civilian life and kind of like go about things you go back into the thick of it

eventually but in a very different way. Yeah. So I served in the Marine Corps in 94, 98. Nothing happened. And then three years later, the towers fell. And I woke up like a lot of people did on September 12th and saw that I lived in a different world. And, you know, fast forward two years later, we're invading Iraq. And all of my marine buddies were

there every single one of them were there and so it was I went to Iraq later as a war reporter beginning in 2004 through 2007 and I went for a variety of reasons but one of them was because all of my friends were over there and because I couldn't ignore it. I was living in San Diego at the time. And as far as I was concerned, that was the story of our era. That was the story of our time. And I, as a writer, I was writing at that point as a writer, that wasn't something that I could ignore, something that I could not, um, not take part in. And then second to that, uh, and perhaps more, more importantly, I had spent almost 10 years in uniform, including ROTC time. And so I had this background, this training,

this education in military matters, and I'd written about it. I'd trained for it, but I'd never actually been in a war. I hated the war. I was opposed to the Iraq war before it began, but all of my friends were over there. And so it was really next to impossible for me to not want to go see what it was like, if that makes sense. I mean, I think in a weird way it does. At least I get how that connection arises. Is it weird for you when you're there to know that you've basically you know you've been in a uniform for 10 years you're with the same guys that you were serving with fundamentally in now in in the thick of a really brutal war zone but they're playing the role of of you know like fighting and you're playing the role of reporting on them fighting, like what's

of observer. Yeah. How does that move through you? Um, that was an, it was a surprisingly organic and natural experience for me because I had already was kind of a writer. I felt like when I was in the service, um, and frankly, I didn't think I was a really great infantry officer. I was a, I was an average infantry officer, but I knew I was an above average writer. And so for me, it felt really natural. And it was, to be honest, it was confusing for a lot of, it was more confusing for the Marines and the soldiers I was with, because I knew how to handle a weapon. I knew all the gear I knew, in many cases, knew the tactics of the situation better than the Marines I was with because I had been trained for a longer, you know, lieutenants and officers tend to have slightly longer training. And so I would sometimes, when I was during my first embeds, I would find myself correcting Marines and playing like a lieutenant sometimes.

And I eventually had to stop that because that's not the kind of thing. That's just inappropriate. So did you have to stop it because people were calling you on it or you were just like, no, this is right? No, people, in fact, asked me to help. And that's really sort of an ethical line. You don't want to, you know, according to the Geneva Convention, if you're there as a reporter, you're not supposed to carry a weapon

and you need to behave. And most reporters, in fact, will wear blue body armor for that reason, so that it is that they're openly acknowledging that they are not a combatant. So blue is like the color designating that you're— Yeah, I don't know. It was never officially designated. I don't know if that's—it might actually be in the Geneva Convention, but it's just something that I noticed, that if you saw an NBC television reporter there, they would tend to wear blue body armor there. At least that was, there was a period in the Iraq war where that, where that was going on. Um, but interestingly,

and I'm not sure if this is a compliment or not, but a lot of units I went and visited because I still had a somewhat military bearing and, but was dressed in, you know, not military gear. I was always confused for a CIA person, which was really interesting. It was sort of like, okay. So that, that was always like flattering, but also just strange. Um, so that I, I, I think it was, it was a weird thing. Cause I was in between these worlds. I was in between civilian and military, but I felt like the fact that I had this military background was helpful to, for in terms of me knowing, knowing the,

the, the lexicon, knowing the language and knowing how things worked. I think that made me a better critical, um, critical thinker, um, being around the military.

So, I mean, what was this, you said you were, you had, um, one of the things you also said was that you had never experienced, um,

you know, being in, in the war, being actually in the battle. Most people who would leave the military, here's a big assumption because I haven't been in the military, so I don't know. But coming from the civilian world, the thought would be, okay, you do your time. You're fortunate. You get out. You're in reasonably good shape. And then you're out and you're living and building a civilian life. And then you don't want to put yourself back in harm's way. What is it about not having been it and wanting to be back there, beyond wanting to be with your friends and beyond just being comfortable in the uniform?

Was there something bigger that was like, I need to be in this to feel it in some way? Yeah, there was, in fact, there was a curiosity on my part. It was a literary, a deeper intellectual yearning to understand. I had read a lot about war. I mean, to be, step back and be perfectly honest, anyone who's being sane will admit that going to a war zone voluntarily is incredibly illogical, irrational thing to do. And a number of soldiers pointed this out to me. And in the book, I describe one incident. After we got blown up in an IED ambush, this soldier next to me got really angry with me.

He's like, why the hell are you here? You could be anywhere. I'm in the Army because I didn't have choices. I came from a small, poor town in Missouri. I didn't have any choices. I'm here because I had no choices. You got to go to college. You could be anywhere in the world, and you fucking came to Iraq. What is wrong with you? Which was like an insulting line of questioning in a way, or accusation at the time, but perfectly reasonable taken in context. And

I don't have a satisfactory answer. I'm never able to fully explain what drew me there. I can point to Hemingway and Michael Hare and David Halberstam and other writers that did that and found that of interest. That's part of my, I think that's, it's tempting to think of that as sort of a dodge is not answering the question, but because I did it,

I wasn't trying to be Ernest Hemingway, but I knew on a certain level I had left the service and become an artist. And like a lot of artists, I was curious about that. If you look at war as something that happens between nations, it exists on that level, on a political level, but it's also an extreme form, perhaps one of the most extreme forms of human experience. And so I was curious about it on a variety of levels, but on a certain level as an altered state of consciousness, as an altered way, an extreme form of man's homo firens,

the man, you know the man you know war man yeah if you're looking for flexible workouts peloton's got you covered summer runs or playoff season meditations whatever your vibe peloton has thousands of classes built to push you we know how life goes new father new, new routines, new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a challenge or rest. And Peloton has everything you need,

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Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. And it's interesting that you brought up Gossack Hemingway, and the ilk of writers who with a lot of machismo, you have to fully engage

with life. You have to go there. You're like Bukowski, you have to just live brutally. Did Bukowski talk about war? Not war, but just the idea of like really hard living, like experiencing suffering to the bone and like pushing yourself to the edge, almost to have something worth expressing. Yeah. And I find that like a lot of artists and writers feel like they have to go there.

Totally. Yeah, and I think a lot of people that are not prone to military adventure or like mountaineering adventure, to take another example, that's, I think, one of the attractions to heroin in particular is people, and you hear musicians talking about that, of like wanting to, like someone who really admired Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, you find that it's not, I mean, I don't want to degrade military service in a sense or compare it too closely with drug abuse. But, you know, there is that idea. Chris Hedges develops that idea in his book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.

There is a drug-like aspect to combat. And so for me as an artist, I think some Marines will find this offensive. But I find the idea, there's a similar impulse to experiment with heroin and to push your body and to push your consciousness to the edge senses to the extreme and live under the regime of deranged sensory input in order to better understand experience. And that wasn't my only motivation to go to the war and why I kept going back, but that was one of the motivations for sure. Yeah. So you mentioned that this conversation with the Marine where he basically asks you,

like, what the hell are you doing here? Yeah. Happens after a really bad incident. Yeah, after we got blown up. Yeah, describe what happened. So the IED ambush, the closest call, I spent about 10 months total in Iraq, spread out over three years. So I collected a handful of close calls. But the closest call was what happened on October 10, 2007.

I was on a patrol with the 1st Infantry Division in southern Baghdad, this neighborhood called Saidiya. And we were called to go take a look at this neighborhood that was burning down, that was on fire. These streets were on fire, and presumably it was Shia burning down Sunni homes in order to drive them out, the Sunni out of the neighborhood. And so we were asked to go look at the street and sort of figure out what was going on and see if we could find who had set the fires. So we drove, the convoy drove to the street, turned onto the street. And as we made our way down and we were like the fifth or fourth vehicle on the convoy, I think we were fourth, the lead vehicle said, hey, we're in a cul-de-sac. We need to turn around.

And there's really nothing going on here anyway. So let's turn the convoy, the patrol around. So as we started to do that, my Humvee, the driver put it in reverse. And we backed over a mortar round that had been rigged and left under a bunch of trash at the side of the road. So that blew we hit that and it blew up um the rear half of the humvee and um damaged the trunk and lit a bunch of ammunition in the back of the trunk on fire and messed up the right rear wheel right rear wheel of the humvee and um so the cabin was filling filling with smoke and everybody was choking and i found out as i found out later everybody lost their

hearing inside the humvee um what's going your mind, like at the moment that this is happening? Uh, for a while I was just sort of not there. Like it was sort of a, almost like a sub aqueous feeling. You just feel like you're a little bit underwater and sort of swimming. You know, I described in the book as like swimming through the sound of the explosion for a little bit. Um, and sometimes I can remember the explosion. Sometimes I can sound of the explosion for a little bit. And sometimes I can remember the explosion, sometimes I can't. It's sort of weird because my human memory is like jazz, and so sometimes my memories of this thing swim a little bit. But at the time, I remember at first being confused,

and then I got angry because things that I thought should be happening were not happening. Specifically, we were, our vehicle was disabled. We were sitting ducks. And so I didn't understand why I thought we should be dead by now. We should have been being shot at. Like if I had had arranged this ambush, I would have put a machine gun, you know, in one of the houses and would be lighting us up. You're playing like the opposition tactician. Yeah, almost.

And so that made me really angry because I was with an army unit that I didn't think was all that shit hot. And so I was angry and yelling, like, where is the QRF? Where is the QRF? Which is the quick reaction force of guys that are supposed to be on standby at the patrol base so that if something goes wrong they're off off and running to get us out of the humvee and gives another one and extract from the area and blow the blow the humvee this damage and get the hell out of there and that just didn't that didn't happen that was not what the unit had planned but so it went from dissociation and being kind of spaced out to anger in the, in the course of just a split second. And then, um, and the, the,

the cabin was filling, filling with smoke and things were kind of ugly inside and everybody was coughing. And then, um, pretty quickly, someone came and put out the fire. Someone from another vehicle came and put out the fire in the back, um, and checked on us and we were all mostly all mostly okay, although everybody was deaf. So eventually we were able to get out of that cul-de-sac. The vehicle's right rear wheel, the tire had been blown out, but there was still a run flat going.

And so we exited the cul-de-sac, got back on the main thoroughfare. And then in about 20 minutes, somehow, I'm surprised that we got back still because the vehicle was like clunk, clunk, clunk. And we made it back to the patrol base. And then about 20 minutes later, they put me on a medevac convoy back to the FOB. And I was in a clinic. And then a week after that, I was back in California. It's bizarre. Yeah, and that's sort of the transition between that really starkly contrasted, punctuated transition from the war zone to peacetime,

particularly in the United States and particularly California, is very jarring for a lot of people. I mean, as you might expect, just psychologically jarring. But that it happened so fast and that each world is kept in such strict isolation from the other. Iraq from stateside America was really hard. It's just very hard to grasp what that means for an individual, like how to reconcile and to, in some ways, make sense of that patchwork of life and that, you know, black and white and night and day and death and life and safety and danger and isolation and immersion. Those contrasts between war and peace and war and stateside was a, that kind of is one of the, I think, central intellectual issues at the heart of PTSD is how do you live?

How do you live after you've almost died? And one psychiatrist I interviewed put it to me this way. It's sort of the central philosophic question about PTSD is the same one that Ishmael faces at the end of Moby Dick, clinging to Quee Quee's coffin. Like, how do you live on the sea of life after all that um, clinging to Queequeg's coffin. Like how do you live, you know, on the sea of life after all that's just after your ship just sank, you know, after you lost your entire moral, your entire moral universe has been destroyed and you're on the ocean clinging to a coffin. How do you, what, how do you live and how do you

live in the aftermath of everything that you've seen? Yeah. Were you aware of this all going on in you emotionally in your head upon arriving home immediately? Or is this something that's kind of... No, no, this is that, um, the stuff I just talked about was actually, I, you know, I was always been a reader, so I knew I was in the middle of a fairly coming home. I understood was going to be a pretty serious exercise, but interestingly, you think that you always assume that the war is going to be the hardest part and the homecoming is really the easiest part.

And obviously you count the days till you get home and you think it's going to be awesome. Everything's going to be perfect. You have this like homecoming fuck fantasy and homecoming food fantasy and homecoming you name it fantasy that you sort of cultivate in your head when you're in Iraq or Afghanistan.

And when you come home, the degree to which that the fantasy, the reality doesn't meet the fantasy, that's, that's one of your disillusionments. That's one of the, what's one of the things that you have to live with and manage is like how, what happened to this stuff that everything I wanted from my country and my friends and my home, when I got back, you want all that to happen. And so, you know, the, the, the degree and the ways in which that doesn I got back, you want all that to happen. And so, you know, the degree and the ways in which that doesn't happen is what you have to, you know, kind of negotiate. But to answer the question in a different way, it's sort of one, I became more aware of the larger philosophical questions and the different ways that different writers that addressed what I will

call PTSD was something that the book taught me. And that's why reading and writing and introspecting can be really powerful, is that writing this book kind of let me in on a lot of stuff that had been kind of a secret, that was hidden in books that I found that explained to me how, like, Michael Hare, the famous Vietnam War correspondent, thought about it, the famous Vietnam War correspondent thought about it, how Tim O'Brien thought about it, how Siegfried Sassoon, who's a famous World War I poet, how he managed it, how Alice Siebold,

the novelist who was a rape survivor, how she handled it, how she described it. So it was, you know, the book was sort of, it was very therapeutic in that way. It does. So here's what I'm wondering about you get home um you immediately know something's different but you also just reference like all these writers who've struggled yeah and reference them before and we talked about the idea that like maybe one of the underlying things that brought you there in the first place was like you need to feel this to deepen yeah when you get back how do you relate to that sort of like original need

again like did you get what you needed on that level or was the was it just not what you expected and more pain and just um in terms of the the needs i might have had in the homecoming set or in terms of the when you went there you're thinking to to yourself, okay, I need to engage in something really intense and fierce and emotional and risky to actually deepen my experience of a life. To live a full life and also probably to give me stuff to really write on that next level, to express my artistry on the next level. Coming back, how do you frame that? Well, I basically came to the conclusion, I realized at some point that the coming home experience and the reintegration of your psyche after the war is as challenging an existential exercise as going to a war. And that I did not realize. I didn't realize that there was so much work involved. I thought, and this is true for any major change in someone's life,

moving from childhood to adulthood, what we call adolescence in America, is a really challenging time for most people. And so I didn't fully understand the degree or even the nature or even the existence of this idea of liminality, of moving from one world and being caught between one world and the other. And that was something that I had to, you know, the war had to teach me that, and the coming home had to teach me that.

And they don't really, and that's sort of the illusion is that, and I think this is sort of an area where the conversation could stand to change, is that we talk a lot about going to war and what that means and being in the war, but we don't talk a lot about the, the heroic aspects of being a survivor and actually coming home and the work, the deep work of reintegrating your psyche after you've been to war and come home. And this is, it's unusually challenging for Americans. I think it's probably, America is probably the hardest country in a sense. We have the best outfitted army in the world, but I think it's probably, the homecoming experience for an American is probably harder than any other soldier in any other army in

the world for this reason. America is so isolated and so insulated that your opportunities to be understood and your opportunities to have a conversation with someone who's going to understand you are exceedingly limited compared to Great Britain or Israel or a place where the military takes on a greater, plays a greater role in daily life than in the United States. And so it's really, it can be really hard for soldiers who don't have a lot of emotional resources who who come from you know a less than rich background you know don't have the opportunity to go to college you know maybe they have an uncle they can talk to but they're not

someone that's that's prone to sit down and read war and peace there can be less social and emotional resources available to that kind of person, if that makes sense. And so, and that's, that's one thing that researching this book taught me is that the heroism of homecoming, which sounds like a funny thing coming out of my mouth, like the, you know, how, what, what the fuck's heroic about coming home from a war? You just get on a plane, but that's what, that's the odyssey. That's Homer's odyssey. Homer's Odyssey. I mean, the first book is the Iliad, which is Achilles at war. The Odyssey is Achilles coming home and failure to come home, and it takes him 10 years.

And so that's if you, you know, it seems like an odd concept, the idea of homecoming as a heroic act, but it's a core document in Western culture. Western literature is based on that being a literal heroic journey. And to take it a step further, I was just recently listening to the Power of Myth series with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, and that's a huge, the hero with a thousand faces, that's a giant part of the whole, and Joseph Campbell, who's, you know, perhaps one of the most acclaimed mythologists of all time, builds this giant cultural theory and uses thousands of citations to show that the hero's journey of normalcy, being called to a great adventure,

being taken to an underworld or another realm, being changed, and bringing back spiritual gifts and boons back to the normal world, and the refusal of the call, and then the refusal of coming home, all of those parts can be seen in all of the major mythologies, from the story of Jesus, to the story of Buddha, to the story of Luke Skywalker, to the story of the, the story of Buddha, to the story of Luke Skywalker, to the story of, you know, the hero in the Matrix. There's this very clear history to this sort of, this journey, this heroic journey. So I think it's important, and I try to get into this to the book, is if, you know, I try to address PTSD from as many levels as I could manage. And one of them,

if you step back as far, far, far away from PTSD as you can and actually just look at it as a human experience, it's really about a hero's journey. And the hero can be anybody. And the hero doesn't have to be somebody with a lightsaber or an M16. But the idea of PTSD as an incomplete heroic journey, as a heroic journey that has not been taken full circle. That is one way to look at it in an emotional context. There are obviously, you know, if you look at the actual DSM psychiatric definition of PTSD, you have a host of very specific,

you know, oftentimes biological symptoms that are a part of it too. But if you think about, let's say, hypervigilance, which is one of the three major PTSD diagnostic criteria or symptoms, of thinking that you see a sniper on the roof that's not there or responding to events on the street as if you were still in a wreck, that is also an instance of an incomplete journey. Part of your body and your psyche is both metaphorically and physically still in another place. And so the degree to which you can complete your homecoming and completely come home and accept that the war is over, that is, um, one way to think about PTSD as a, um,

and trying to get around it is, is completing that journey coming home. So if, if you do take that lens and, and, um, and you perceive this sort of like the way through is to complete the journey. How, how is the journey completed? Um, well, it's done in a number of ways. There's, I mean, um, uh, to answer in the, in the most boilerplate way possible, a psychiatrist would tell you, well, you complete

that journey through therapy, through talk therapies and through working through particular issues and re-examining. And one of the therapies I went through with the VA that I didn't think was particularly effective was let's revisit the IED attack in Baghdad and let's talk about it and revisit it so many times that it doesn't bother you anymore. So let's just keep telling that story. But in the larger and I think more intellectually broad way of coming home, what I, the way I increasingly think about PTSD, and this is what I try to tell people is think of it as a question of, change and adjustment because, like the old aphorism, you can't step in the same river twice. It's always changing. You were not the same person

you were when you left for the war. You were not, by definition, the same person that you were when you enlisted the Marine Corps. So you're back from the war now. You're out of uniform, and you're trying to act like you were when you were 17, before you went over there. You're doing the wrong thing. You need to change your, you need to literally, and then you see this in other cultures, when you get older in different cultures, you know, let's say Latin America, you change your clothes. The outward expresses, is consonant with the N-word. And so the idea of coming back and acknowledging that you're a different person and changing and becoming a more mature person and a person who's more in harmony with their environment

at that, you know, wherever they may find themselves. And I think that sort of, it seems obvious, but, you know, perhaps that seems obvious, but I think for a lot of people, they come back and they want what they had before. And that's what I was kind of talking about earlier, talking about earlier with the homecoming fantasies is people expect they want a better, they want all of the things they had before. And you need to understand you're not only older after you've survived a traumatic experience like a war or being raped or a natural

disaster, but you're actually a different person. So you have to reinvent yourself. You have to become a different person. And here's an example. One of my cousins is actually a very accomplished mountaineer and is sponsored by Patagonia. He's done all of these amazing climbs. He's almost like superhuman great climber. And in 2010, he took an 80-foot fall on this Canadian mountain and almost died. And he was in the hospital and discovered, as he was looking over his journals and thinking and writing, that he wanted to use his accident and his experience as a way to recalibrate his life and to start some things over and to fix some things and to correct some things that he wanted to change.

And so, and that, and I ended up using him. I, I, you know, I talked to him to having no idea what, what I was going to do with his story. And as I started writing this book, I realized that there needed to be some sort of addressing of the idea of post-traumatic change and growth. And that's, and post-traumatic growth is, uh, an area of increasing research that there's some researchers at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, that are looking. That actually that's their bailiwick, is looking at how people are transformed in positive ways after traumatic events. It's such a fascinating area of, um, I think research and, you know, as you share in the book, it's as PTSD is sort of becoming, you know, very sadly the condition of our time or one of the major conditions of our time, um, you know,

to figure out how do you bridge the gap or how do you take, can you, I guess not even how, but the first question is, can you actually work with somebody who's experiencing the trauma as something which is destroying them and somehow move them through a process or exercise or whatever it may be to allow them to emerge with that being experienced as a catalyst for growth and improvement? Like, is there anything out there right now which answers that question? Or is it even answerable? Is it possible? I certainly think it's possible.

I think it's partly in terms of positive models for change. I think, to cite a book, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, and you look at a lot of the people who survived the Holocaust and came out miraculously somehow came out the other side with a greater appreciation for human life. And there are myriad examples of that. You know, I don't know. I'm sort of in the middle of that question now. I think in terms of resources to help turn it into a positive thing, I think you need to look at yourself and look at your resources and figure out how to, you know, it's

a lot of it's sort of a perspective change and finding a new way to look at your own, what you've been through. And I think for me, the more I've kind of thought about where I was with the war, I found a lot of lessons in it that I didn't expect. And one of those was what I learned prior to being blown up. But in 2007, in Anbar province, I was out on patrol and dealing with Marines who were, for the first time, actually dealing with tribal leaders and sheikhs and trying to work with them and partner with them to improve their communities and improve security in their communities. And talking to them, they would repeatedly tell me, yeah, these were probably the same people that were killing us the year before,

that we were fighting, literally fighting the year before. And for me, just that example, which was very powerful as I reflected back on the experience, it wasn't powerful to me at the time, but as I thought back on it, I thought, you know, that's really pretty heavy to think about of, you know, and when I see people having conflicts in their families and having arguments with people, I think, I think of the heroism of those Marines of actually just sucking it up and realizing that we could keep fighting these guys, but I need to find a way to have this conversation with these people who I did not, who I did not like because we were fighting last year and finding a way to have, to, to decide to work at making a conversation with someone who is very different from you,

because it's going to be better for everybody. That, for me, was a really powerful learning point. And so I guess to try to answer your original question of like, how do we find resources to improve ourselves post-trauma? What's the compass azimuth for that? I think trauma transforms us in a lot of ways, but we have some choices in how it transforms us. And one of the choices we can take is to review what happened and review it in an intelligent way. And for me, that was looking over my journals and writing about it and the wisdom, and I think ultimately trying, we need to encourage veterans and trauma survivors to look for wisdom in their

experience and look for life lessons, you know, and not necessarily like in a refrigerator magnet kind of way, but finding, uh, finding some meaning in the carnage. And one of the ways I did was, was what I, what I just spoke of, of learning to converse with people that are incredibly different from me and making it happen. Yeah. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

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The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. So when you talk about that in the context of, you know, coming through a wartime scenario, you start to say, okay, and if you really zoom the lens out, maybe you buy into there was a greater cause, whatever. What do you, you know, I think the more troubling scenario, or the more challenging, at least in my mind, you know, and not certainly for certain soldiers who've gone through certain traumatic experiences, it's got to be brutal. And you brought up a couple things. One is everybody brings into it a different set of genetic and environmental predispositions, tools, and skills, which will profoundly affect the way that you process it moving out. And also, you also brought up Viktor Frankl. Your ability to attribute meaning to the suffering, I'm sure has got to play a huge role. So what I'm thinking about now is,

we've been talking a lot about the context of PTSD in the scheme of military life and coming home from big trauma like that. But you've also thrown out there, you've brought up a number of times rape or violent crime, something that happens in everyday life. It's more common. It's more common. It happens in the blink of an eye.

It's short term. And, you know, does the person who experiences that, is what happens in their brain similar from the context of, you know, like PTSD to what happens with somebody who's coming home from the military? And, and can you do process it in the same way? Or do you process it differently? Or is it just completely unique for every person? More what you just said, I think of it, you know, PTSD is this very, it's this very powerful, useful concept that's helped create a lot of powerful ideas and a community of survivors in a lot of ways. But I think if you really look at it, you have to accept the fact.

I mean, rape survivors are the most common. The most toxic and common form of trauma is rape. And it's way more common. And I think we need to acknowledge the heroic journey of rape survivors far more than we do. Because, you know, we can talk to our blue in the face about veterans and my journey and the drama of war, but it's still only 1% of the population that has to struggle with that. Whereas 50% of the population, roughly 91% of all rape victims are female.

All women have to face that, the fear of it or the actuality of it. And so one of the, one of the goals that I have in the book is to, to address that and to, you know, to try to celebrate and really identify the heroism of, of rape survivors and their journey. And so I think in terms of the actuality of how to characterize their journey with um the journey of a veteran there are a lot of there are many things in common with um there is uh if you think metaphorically of trauma as a journey into a kind of underworld uh you know in this dark confusing depth uh depths where uh you know dark forces are you are at the will of dark forces and you are submit you are at the will of dark forces and you are submit, you are at the whim of evil to paint it starkly the, that both a rape survivor and where,

where great cruelty is enacted upon you. The war veteran and the rape survivor and the tsunami survivor and the, and the car, the auto accident victim all are suddenly, you know, victims of physics and really cruel biology. And so that they all share in common the common themes of helplessness and being overwhelmed by the universe and and by the the

mind thinking that it's going to be extinguished and so there's on a certain basic existential level there are certain commonalities but um you mentioned earlier, like, is everybody different? And I think in terms of the physical journey and the actual individual journey, there are, everybody's got their own, you know, personal philosophy and view of the world. And that is a huge part of what happens, how the survivor's journey is enacted over time. So it's, there are some certainly common biological themes, but then the larger, the larger themes, you know, trauma as one, Robert Solero, this very smart psychoanalyst told me is like, trauma is all about context and what, and the story and the details the person brings

into their experience. Those are, you know, because trauma so so often it's hard to really understand why a particular type of trauma why that was worse than something else the person might have seen in some cases like the fact that like i was also shy i saw people die in an ied attack but that was not as traumatic as the one i was in for different reasons And so you have to understand the particulars of each event and why that is disturbing to a person more than another event, if that makes sense. So it's both universal and specific, I would say. What actually, let's go a little bit actually into sort of the brain and PTSD. What actually happens there and why is it so brutal to try and move through it?

I mean, are there permanent changes that actually happen in the brain or your chemistry? Because it seems like PTSD is one of those things is there's a shift that happens where it's almost like people are permanently changed and they never leave behind. They learn how to live with it or move through it or keep it as a part of themselves. But it's, it's never, it's almost like it feels like it's something that never actually goes. Never goes away. Yeah. Well, there are, I have to say sort of a disclaimer, I think in some ways neuroscience has been oversold in the media. And I don't think it's still we're still just now getting a basic understanding of what I mean, when I started the book, I assumed that my first assumption was that we were living in this golden era of PTSD research and that neuroscientists had a lot to tell us

about all of these very specific effects of PTSD on the brain. And in fact, that's not the case. We know the brain is like the ocean. We just barely know what's in there. And we have a very basic understanding of the very complex neuroscientific impacts of PTSD on the brain. But there are two things we can say for certain. And as I began this book, I thought of it as primarily a neuroscience inquiry. And as I got into it, I had to change some of the book for that reason. The couple of things that I talk about in the book that are, I think, worth discussing

is that it does, we do know that trauma does not only impact the physiology of the person who survives it, who undergoes it and survives it, but it impacts their offspring and their grandchildren. So if a, and this, they found a researcher in New York named Rachel Yehuda discovered this when she began, she had a sense that there was something different about Holocaust survivors.

And so she started looking at cortisol levels, which is a stress hormone that's released when people are under stress and they can basically, they take a little bit of your saliva and they can say, okay, you have X amount of cortisol in your bloodstream at this point um and the more cortisol the greater the cortisol level is generally thought the more the higher the stress level and she discovered that uh cortisol levels are actually impacted transgenerationally and she found that holocaust the grandchildren of holocaust survivors reacted in a different cortisol levels when exposed to disturbing slide imagery in a classroom than a control subject who had no,

whose grandmother was not a Holocaust survivor, if that makes sense. Somebody that would have come from Ireland or France or something, for example, that did not experience the Holocaust. So there is this it does impact and it's not clear um how that all plays out over the long term it sounds like maybe epigenetics in some level it is yeah um and so there is this this sense that the per the body is actually changed and if you think about just from a from a basic evolutionary standpoint um as the human response to the environment, there is, what that tells me is that as a survival mechanism, the offspring are passed on with this adaptation

to an adverse environment. And so they have a different and more reactive cortisol stress hormone system because they're brought in. So that's what's kind of interesting as you talk about, like, you know, there's this theory about the orchid child and how delicate, you know, some people are more resilient than others and you could, um, it sounds like an insanely racist, uh, argument to make, but you do, there is some scientific evidence behind the fact that like, um, you know, people that, that survived the Holocaust, there is a, they have a more resilient, you know, a different, um, physiological response to their environment than somebody who came from, you know, Brazil to take a, you know, an oddball example that

there is there, you know, it does change the person. And the other, the other thing I learned was, there is, I interviewed James McGaw, who is this pioneering neuroscientist at UC Irvine, who began playing around with what some have called the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind drug propranolol, which is this really old beta blocker heart control heart drug that suppresses the human adrenal response, the fight, fight or flight or freeze response. And you what it does, they, he found that if he gave, if he, if you give someone propranolol within 72 hours after a traumatic

event, you can actually control and in some ways dampen the traumatic charge of a memory. And subsequent to that, another researcher, Roger Pittman at Harvard, found that if you were to give someone an imaginal exposure and ask them to revisit and talk about a traumatic event and give them propranolol, they found that the memory actually changed shape and lost some of its traumatic charge so you can it's kind of kind of freaky kind of sci-fi but you actually can modify people's you can memory is plastic you can actually change you know you can you can you can manipulate it to an extent so that that's one area that um there's a lot of neuroscience happening on PTSD right now that I could talk about, but that's all pretty early and kind of contingent.

And in fact, I ran into a number of cases where people thought that something was the case. Like for a number of years, they thought that the hippocampus was shrunk by by trauma the hippocampal volume was reduced by traumatic events and then someone went to uh what they call the uh vietnam vietnam war twin registry and actually looked at so one twin went to the war another one didn't and they found that um hippocampal volume tends to be uh hereditary so there have been kind of these, and I say that just as an example of neuros, I think we're being, we live in a time of neuroscience theory where it's very popular and trendy to, to say the brain tells us X, Y, and Z. And my view, the argument I make in the book is that PTSD is less of a brain event than a whole, than an existential event. And so there are, there are some things we know, but there's more,

there's far more that we don't know about PTSD from a neurological and a neuroscientific standpoint. Yeah. And you also bring up, and we were talking about this just before we were, we started recording this, the sense of disembodiment that happens with PST and that one of the things that's being explored is sort of reconnecting you with your physical body. We talked about Bessel van der Kerk and yoga. Yes. And you write about as this sort of way to reconnect. Talk to me about this a little bit.

Yeah. Well, I interviewed, when I started writing this book, a very good friend of mine contacted me and said, I want to tell you my story. And she proceeded to tell me the story of when she'd been raped as a young woman and how Western talk therapies did not work for her. She did exposure therapy, as I did, and she found that it made her symptoms worse. And she started doing yoga and eventually went to a yoga retreat in Montreal. And she found, in her words, it saved her life and helped put her, it was the first time she felt safe and she felt loved because there was a nurturing environment she found herself in,

in this yoga studio, this one particular yoga studio. And it allowed her to deal with her symptoms in a pretty direct physiological way and it allowed her to have, to deal with her symptoms in a pretty direct physiological way. And it allowed her to, um, start to interpret different stimuli, uh, and different, um, experiences within her body in a positive way and to exert a kind of control over it that she hadn't had, that she hadn't had, that she'd lost for about 10 years after being raped. She had lost a, she had lost sort of a positive feedback loop with her body. It had been, you know, she had been through this awful experience. And yoga was the first thing that actually addressed the problem in that way.

Because if you can talk about trauma, you can talk about awfulness and these sorts of things and try to get an intellectual grasp on it. And for me, that was very important. And this sort of speaks to how each survivor's journey is different and each survivor's treatment plan needs to be different. And for her, the talk didn't do anything at all and really sort of made it worse for her. And it's interesting because, and this just goes back to the idea that PTSD is sort of this artificial construct that we have created. That's a very useful construct, but it's still artificial. There is, you know, it's this diagnosis that was invented in the United States in 1980

after the Vietnam War. And it didn't exist for a very long time. Whereas depression, manic depression, schizophrenia, these mental disorders have a far longer lineage. And depression, for example, goes all the way back to the time of Hippocrates. So there's this very deep sense of it being central to the human condition, whereas PTSD is less so. And with yoga, yoga is an old tradition that has really nothing to say about trauma explicitly. It doesn't really say,

as I understand, it doesn't really have anything to say about how trauma should be evaluated by an individual. But it does try to keep the mind, the idea behind yoga, and correct me if I'm wrong, is to bring the body and mind into greater accord. And that idea is one that can be very, has no particular designs on the PTSD survivor, unlike modern therapy, which is like, this is my theory, how it works, and we're going to solve it as if this were a medicine. We're going to give you this medicine that's going to do it for you, which does not speak to the whole person, doesn't speak to, and actually tends to look at sort of the old Cartesian divide,

as like the mind is this thing and the body is this other thing whereas yoga as i understand it as i was explaining it was was the idea of integrating the two and ignoring the normal western distinction between body and mind yeah it's almost the opposite because it's i mean there's um you know one of the classic sutras that translates literally to yoga is the stilling of the mind so it's almost like you're instead of focusing entirely on your mind you're just you're you're trying to just is the stilling of the mind. So it's almost like you're, instead of focusing entirely on your mind, you're trying to just make it still and then focusing on other things. That doesn't mean that in that stillness, you know, like horrific or fantastic things won't arise,

because often through that clarity is where, like, you start to open deeper. But then the physical practice, and this is what I was taught. You know, I taught yoga for seven years and owned a center the the physical practice originally from my understanding was really more about um preparing your body physically to be able to sustain what were considered you know like the more important practices the the meditative practices and the deeper insight which did not necessarily have a physical component. Right. Okay. And that's where the,

you know, sort of like the magic was the deeper stilling of the mind. But what I saw, I mean, I taught for seven years, taught thousands of students, including, you know,

like six weeks after nine 11 in hell's kitchen, New York. And, you know, you would see on a regular basis, deep, deep joy and sorrow and pain emerge. Being released, yeah. Oh, yeah.

I mean, people shaking violently, weeping uncontrollably. And you got to a point where you could almost tell who was about to go there. And you also knew the particular postures or movements that would release sort of a set of deeper emotions and it was almost like you it was almost freakish um but understand we would we trained a lot of teachers too and when we're doing that teacher the people would ask us is this okay if i'm teaching a class and that happens and you say it's beautiful i mean it's it's incredible but at the same time as a teacher and as somebody who owned a studio we always kept the short list of qualified professionals to refer out to because afterward yeah we were very cognizant of the fact that we were not you know we're not trained to actually process what goes

on beyond really sort of like guiding people through that immediate experience. Right. Which I think raises an interesting point is I think, um, from a legal standpoint, you're not qualified and you do have to, as a business owner, you have to be careful. But I feel like that, I actually think that that raises a very interesting point in the sense of, um, why I think, um, I mean, in a way I disagree with you, um, that you you're that you are qualified in the sense to handle that kind of experience. Because I think one of the great mistakes of modern society is that we have sort of self, we have selected this new group of scientific shamans that we call psychiatrists. And they have in some ways, replaced the ancient shaman and the priest and the poet.

And I don't think in many cases they're terribly qualified to speak to what people have been through. And I say that on some authority because I've been to war, come back and talk to psychiatrists, and a lot of them don't know shit, to be blunt about it. One researcher I spoke to didn't seem to know where Fallujah was. Had never read the works of Tim O'Brien. Didn't, I mean, didn't seem to have a basic understanding of the nuts and bolts of the

war on terror. And so for me, I feel like putting psychiatry on, on this high level and psychology on a high level and then saying, well, you have to be a professional to address these issues is, is, is a mistake on a certain level. And you, but you do, obviously there,. But you do, obviously, context within different circumstances. If someone's really melting down and they are not a loved one and they deeply need help, you need to refer them to a mental health professional. But I think it's also important to recognize that the social ecology

that a person finds themselves in, their family, their circle of friends are far more important, you know, in your average circumstances than this supposed medical professional. So I'm kind of, you know, sort of, say again? Yeah, kind of mixed on there. Yeah. And well, you know, obviously for that circumstance, you got to be careful. You got to protect yourself as a business owner.

But I think, you know, it sort of freaks me out because it's a pretty radical – the book is pretty radical in a lot of ways because I'm not part of – I've certainly read Michel Foucault and Thomas Zahs and the anti-psychiatry people, and I'm not really out to jackhammer. I don't think that the hospital should be blown up or something because I'm not, you know, cause they, there's a lot of people that need very serious medically trained medical attention. But I also think if you, you know, again, stepping back and saying, asking the simple question, what is PTSD? You know, why, why would I expect to find wisdom from someone who's been in a lab coat all of their life and just went to medical school? I don't think they know anything more than I do. I don't think they have greater, you know, not that I'm a sage, but you know, what makes this person so wise? You know, I think one of the other things that we saw happening, and again, just relating to my experience, as I'm just

thinking this through, as you're saying this, and you're absolutely right, by the way, and, and I should reveal I'm a former lawyer. So that was, that was probably, yeah, absolutely. My head is, you know, like the liability. I love how you're a former lawyer. So that was probably, yeah, absolutely in my head, like the liability. I love how you're a former lawyer. You're already a former lawyer? Yeah, absolutely. But the other thing that I noticed immediately in that sort of post-9-11 New York City world was that people were literally just wandering around the streets wanting to find a community to be with.

Even if there was nothing, they just wanted to be in community. And with, even if there was nothing, they just want to be in community. And a lot of people I think didn't have that. And I think one of the things that happens in a yoga class or yoga, you know, like studio versus just doing it at your home, watching videos or something like that is that there, there's a sense of belonging that provides a certain amount of solace and

healing that. And if you're talking about what's interesting, There's a sense of belonging that provides a certain amount of solace and healing. And if you're talking about soldiers coming home to a place where they no longer feel that they belong, they've changed, but maybe the people that they've left in the community hasn't. And we're wired to have to belong. So how do I find that new sense of belonging? There's immense pain just in that alone. And to be able to create a new community or a new engine of belonging, I think is immensely powerful. I don't know how that affects the recovery from PTSD. But I know that in seeing what happened in the experience post 9-11 in New

York City, and having been like very intimately involved in the literally the creation from the ashes of a new community that was a health and healing community. I think that was a huge part of it. Yeah, I like how you put that, an engine of new belonging. That, I think, is really important. And I want to answer that in two ways. One, there is this, you know, I've spoken a little bit of PTSD is a very much an American disease. And I think you can see that if you compare, some people have looked at how different cultures process trauma and the idea, and in America we tend to, which is much more atomized and

family bonds aren't as strong as they might be in the Philippines or in parts of India. And they find that the American view of it tends to make this individual journey and that we deemphasize the role of themselves and how they, how they view themselves. They view themselves as being part of a system, not an individual, not like America. We look at basically everybody as a breadwinner. It doesn't matter. Male, female,

you know, get off your ass and get to work. Whereas in, in different cultures, there's, they're more like you have a family role to play in your larger extended family that you play a certain role. So there's a different way.

So, you know, you could, you know, you could see that PTSD expresses itself in a much different way in different cultures. And secondarily, I'd say as an engine of new belonging, one of the ways, one of the things that I think for me as sort of a wilderness person, someone who's drawn to open space and to empty spaces, the Israeli Defense Force and the Israeli veterans are very strongly encouraged, unofficially encouraged to take kind of a gap year after they get done with their military service and travel. And, and I don't know, it's an open question how effective this is, but they tend to go to to Latin America and like India. And I've talked to some IDF an open question how effective this is, but they tend to go to Latin America and like India.

And I've talked to some IDF veterans about this and they say that is a way to sort of, and there are some anecdotal neuroscientific anecdotes to support this, that it does stimulate the hippocampus, which is an area implicated in trauma, and going to a new place with a new group of people helps you to rewire your brain and create a new social setting and a new geographic environment, if that makes sense. And there is a group, the Wounded Warrior Project is basically a veteran service organization. And one thing they do is do a lot of wilderness trips together. And they get people to go on trips and create, in a manner of speaking, an engine of new belonging. They're actually connecting with people. And they're on a journey with a new set of people, which I think is important.

And I think it's important for—and so I'm a big supporter of that and any way that a survivor can find to take a journey and to— because I think, you know, exertion and adversity create communities, I think. And that's one thing I found like, you know, taking backpacking trips and doing climbing trips in the, in the Sierra Nevada, that was something you find is that you start the trip and, and you learn a lot about somebody by traveling with them. And so travel, I think is a great, you know,

travel in a group and undertaking a, you know, discipline like yoga, discipline, you know, I went and undertaking a, you know, discipline like yoga discipline. You know, I went and visited a, this may sound sort of, sort of opposite, but a mixed martial arts studio near my house. And I was writing the book and that wasn't, was sort of an engine of new belonging and a new community that people, people could be a part of. There's another, another veteran that, you know, I've gotten to know started his own brewery in Virginia beach, the veterans bureau young veterans brewing company. And that, Another veteran that I've gotten to know started his own brewery in Virginia Beach, the Young Veterans Brewing Company.

And that's sort of interesting in sort of a hipster way is that craft beer has a very convivial sense to it. And people collaborate and make beer. And it's this very kind of old world, old school way of craft, of as an artisanal community. And I think that is another, you know, another example of something that has nothing to do with the military, really nothing to do with, you know, the specific trauma, you know, traumatic experience you've had, but finding a new social setting. And I think that's really important in America, because we're all just visiting, we all came, you know, none of us have are rooted in the land as they are in Iraq where people have lived there for 50 generations, as far back as they can find,

as far back as they can tell. You know, we all, you know, everybody here, America's, you know, an incredibly, you know, almost dangerously individualistic society at times. And so to develop and find social bonds with people is a serious task. So I think it's an even greater and more important task post-trauma. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I want to come full circle here. You've been really gracious with your time. So the name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer that term to you, to live a good life, what does it mean to you? What comes up?

For me, at this point in my life, I think of myself as being really lucky to have this role as a storyteller and as an artist. So I look at one of the sort of missions I've come across, decided on lately is using the experiences I've had and my ability to to capture and express that as a way of connecting with the world and improving the world but also after Iraq you know I've in and after having worked on this book I've sort of learned to to think of relationships in a different way and I think one of the one of the interesting things about being a military person for a while is you're taught to not trust your feelings and to basically numb out a lot. And so I'm more into view emotional exchange as being somehow effeminate or not worth your time, something to shy away from. And for me, living a good life is more about,

um, you know, how Philip K Dick lived his life of like always trying to connect and always trying to understand and to connect people with people that I might not have wanted to connect with before. So, you know, I've thought about this a lot. I'm not answering the question as poetically as I'd always imagined, but there was, there is a is a sense of um the war taught me a lot about uh our essential impermanence and it taught me a lot about how um how brief uh our time is on on the planet and how to to really value that and literally value every breath that you have that that's some that's a gift that's, you know, it's on loan. Because I've, you know, I've seen that stop. And I think that, you know, Winston Churchill said, there's nothing as exhilarating as being shot at without result. Meaning you get shot at and you don't get wounded. And I think,

and that's, and anybody will tell you, like, when they survive a car accident or, you know, or a mugging or being shot at. And then that next moment is the moments that follow were ones of sheer delight and exhilaration and an adrenaline rush of being alive. If you can think about extending that moment to the rest of your life, that's how I, that's how, that's my ideal of like how to live of like cherishing life like that for the rest of your life. Given the opportunity to go back into a war zone, would you? Uh, no. I mean, I had chances to go. Um, I was asked to go back to Afghanistan and,

and buy a magazine and did write a proposal and it never came to pass. And that was basically the end of it for me. I wasn't, you know, in Americans have that choice, you know, someone in Beirut doesn't usually have that choice. They get drawn into it. So it's a, I have to give that, answer that question with an asterisk. Because if, you know, if America was invaded again, of course I would have to. But, you know, if something were to happen, I would certainly fight.

But am I going to get on a plane and fly to Anbar province to go report on the war? Absolutely not. Thank you so much. Really interesting conversation. Thanks for having me. So I hope you guys found that conversation valuable. If you know anybody who you think might really benefit from the conversation, maybe it's somebody who's actually struggling with or living with or trying to move through PTSD or family or friends who are just trying to understand what it's really all about and what the options are, you know, feel free to share the conversation with anyone who you think it might make a difference for. And if you, if you enjoyed it, as always, I'd so appreciate

if you would just jump on over to iTunes, maybe share a thumb up and review. Again, always only if it feels right and only if it's with integrity for you. And if you're looking at this year and thinking, you know, how can I get the absolute best out of it? Maybe you have an idea in your head to create something really extraordinary as a vocation, or maybe you have something you're working on. You'd like to figure out how to build it in a different way or more effectively, then go head on over to goodlifeproject.com slash immersion and take a look at the seven-month program that will launch fairly soon. See if it feels right to you. As always, thanks so much for sharing a little bit of your time. Wishing you a fantastic week ahead.

I'm Jonathan Field signing off for Good Life Project. We'll see you next time. between me and you, you're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

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