PTSD Recovery Secrets: Facing the Healing Journey, Triggers & Coping Strategies – Transcript

00:00 – Welcome & David Spencer’s PTSD recovery journey begins

full episode

Brent: Happy time period, Bracketeers. We’re coming at you again, back with David Spencer. This is part two.

David: Part two.

Brent: Of our episode on trauma and PTSD. If you haven’t listened to part one, you really, really should. David Spencer has a lot of qualifications. Probably the most significant is that he is a bracketeer. He listens to the show. He’s excited about the show. He wanted to be on the show. Dreams come true.

David: Shazam. Here I am.

Brent: It’s come true.

David: And you didn’t have to give me a box of crayons, either. Exactly.

Brent: All right. All right. All right. So for those of you who don’t know, the joke about jarheads is you give them crayons and they eat them. So David, feeling superior with his army, is trying to look down on me because everyone knows the army is deeply inferior when they have to sit next to the Marines. So this is to be expected.

David: Yeah, I’ll just keep dreaming.

Brent: He will be like brothers to everyone.

David: That’s right. And look, we can talk about each other, but nobody else can.

Brent: That’s right. Don’t try to come between us.

David: That’s right. It’d be a double punch.

Announcer: This is Full Mental Bracket.

Brent: All right, so we started on part one, and we talked about PTSD, and we defined it real quickly. PTSD is when things threaten you, life, limb, or danger, or when you observe things that threaten life, limb, or danger. You have primary or secondary.

David: Or you live through those things.

Brent: You live through those things. And you can also have secondary when you live with someone who’s lived through those things.

David: And it rubs, rolls off on you.

Brent: Like an unbalanced or PTSD parent can really do some damage to their kids.

David: Or a parent that’s been through combat as well.

Brent: Right.

David: Go back. That’s one way to check for them.

Brent: Yeah. Go back to that. Listen to part one to get all that stuff. Cause we’re not going to go into it again.

David: Yeah. It’s a long way back.

Brent: Yeah, man. It was, it was a whole episode ago.

David: But PTSD, basically we’re concentrating on that, but we’re also concentrating on a lot of the triggers and a lot of things that help soothe the triggers or calm the triggers and how to avoid being in positions like that where you get triggered and go have an anxiety attack or have a, as I call it, I have a PTSD moment.

Brent: Okay.

David: Which my wife will tell you real quick, don’t let that happen.

Brent: It’s interesting you say that because you know we my wife and I we have an empty nest and we kind of got this whole This fun game of like hide-and-seek, you know We’ll go down and be in the dark and room and go boo and boo. It’s fun and then I’m here life has got real lifey here for last couple months.

David: It has.

Brent: And so got a lot of a lot of things going on at the same time and my my bandwidth is narrower and narrower and she popped out there that I went boo and I don’t you dare do that just like when did that stop being fun?

David: As you change like I guess.

Brent: I guess last week it stopped being fun. It’s like until such a time that I have more of my brain and I don’t feel like life is trying to choke me out, maybe we postpone this game.

David: We’re pretty much empty nesters two. My children and grandchildren live in Florida, so it’s a long way down to see them.

Brent: Yeah. The good news is you get some warning.

David: I do get some warning when they come.

Brent: I love the fact that my kids are in town, but sometimes it’s like, knock, knock, knock, knock. It’s like, who’s that?

David: Who’s that? Don’t be knocking on my door.

Brent: Does your texter not work? Like, nah, I’m here.

David: Call me.

Brent: Oh, man. So I wanna, I wanna… A point I wanna make, we didn’t make in the last episode, is that although to people who haven’t been through it, you know, the stress and the PTSD looks, it looks, I mean, it’s not rational. If it looks irrational, it looks scary, it looks crazy, it makes no sense. But I came across a definition, I read this paper, the authors are Keck, Compton, Schoenberg and Compton, Trauma Recovery, A Heroic Journey. And this quote says, trauma symptoms may have temporarily served as a makeshift coping skills in a resource-barren environment. You didn’t have resources, you need coping skills, you did trauma stuff. In fact, the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional reactions may have been useful during the time of trauma and represent a reasonable response to extraordinary adverse circumstances.

David: That’s a whole lot of words.

Brent: But let’s just repeat that again. So when people are freaking out with PTSD, these things help them at one point in time when life was dangerous. They came back to a more saner world. It doesn’t match very well. And it represents a reasonable response to extraordinary circumstances.

David: Absolutely. Absolutely. And a lot of that’s a training that you have where you go into such environments. The better training you have, the better you can deal with those environments. and the less, and that’s not, I’m not taking anything away from the trauma that you experience, but I do believe that if you’re, the more, the better you are trained, the more better, the better you are trained, the better you can handle it and better you can walk away with it, walk away from it, in one piece, and you can bring those with you back.

Brent: If you’re not prepared for the stress. I’m prepared for you with a burden. Yes, that’s a Yoda, that’s a bad, badly spoken Yoda. You know, and a thing that we like to do, you know, we talk about the story framework on the show. And so one model of story that I’ve come across is that, you know, a character comes into the story and they come with a backstory. They have a wound or a ghost. And the story problem is basically they have a broken model of the world. Something happened to them in the past. They think the world, I have to deal with the world like this. This new thing comes that starts the story and it doesn’t work anymore.

David: It’s broke, you gotta put it together.

Brent: You know, Luke Skywalker’s minding his own business, you know, moisture farming and whatnot, and something comes and shifts everything. No, you can’t keep doing that. You have to do something different. And so, and that’s the same thing with this PTSD, is like you have this whole pattern of things that work in the stressful situation, they keep you alive.

David: Absolutely.

Brent: And then you come back and you leave that, and you find yourself overreacting to other things because you’re not in that stressful situation anymore.

David: Up till I retired, I always could fall back on the military, my soldiers, my men, my women, to help me through it. Then after I retired, You don’t have that. You have the support channel of your family, but you don’t have nothing else.

Brent: So you were kind of hinting that you had seen got some counseling for this?

David: I did.

Brent: Or not who, but what are the things that they have you discussed?

David: We talked about our experiences, number one, and how you deal with it. Number two, you talk about Coping.

Brent: Right.

David: And then the third thing you always talk about is triggers. And what, don’t put yourself in a position that your post-traumatic stress episode can happen. You can stay out of those circumstances. But you know it’s going to trigger, you don’t do it. You know it. And the thing is you have to, the way I was learned and the way I taught myself to and learned from others is, Just don’t put yourself in that position. And why practice being miserable when you’re already miserable?

Brent: That’s true. I mean, that sounds like a standard part of recovery therapy.

David: It is. It is.

Brent: Whatever your weakness is, don’t go there if you can avoid it. Go there with a plan. Build some guardrails. Build some stuff.

David: Right. If you’re beating your hand with a hammer and it hurts, don’t do it no more. I mean, it’s just that simple. But you know, some people are hard-headed or hard-handed one.

Brent: I love it. Have you seen the sketch with Bob Newhart? And he’s like, I’ve got this revolutionary therapy for you. OK, well, I can’t help. Stop biting my nails. So are you ready for this? Stop it. And that’s it. That’s it.

David: Yeah.

Brent: He just, Person after person would come in his office, and he’s like stop it. Stop it right now.

David: Yeah. And a lot of times you just, your mind, if you’re in a, if you’re coming to a incident or in a position where you might just have an episode, you have to learn to recognize it. And, uh, and deal with it in a manner that is, not hurtful, not just to you, but to other people too. Because a lot of times people have PTSD, their intentions are not bad. They’re very selfless.

Brent: It’s just that they can’t handle it.

David: It’s just a position where they can’t get through. And I’ve had friends that have been through life, I mean, their life almost snatched out of their lungs. and watch them recover, and they get through these positions, through these episodes, and they just work it out, work out what the trigger is. And I tell them all the time, just figure out what the trigger is, figure it out. I mean, slow down, write it down, journal. Journals are great, it’s the best thing for recovery and anything. Just journal what you’re feeling.

Brent: Oh, that’s so true. We’ve covered that on several episodes. It’s just like, journaling is a great way to get these, fast-moving, hard-to-grasp thoughts and put them on the page.

David: It’s amazing just taking a pen in hand, putting it on a piece of paper, you’re transferring, I call it transferring from your heart, because you’re going to put it on the paper.

Brent: And you get all this stuff out of your head where you can actually look at it. Instead of these racing thoughts that you can’t keep up with, you can actually see them. You know, the thing that we mentioned is like the system one and the system two, the automatic processes and the deliberate processes. And by going through there, you put it out like you were doing a checkbook. Okay, now I can activate my deliberate processes and look at my actual thought process.

David: And then you check it off as you go.

Brent: Where does this equation, wait a minute, statement number three, that makes no sense. That’s not true.

David: Let’s go back and figure this out. Yeah. Why did I write that down? What was the reason behind that?

Brent: Journaling is amazing.

David: And I’ve journaled, I don’t know how many books full of journaling. And what I’ll do is I feel like I’m over that, I’ll take that journal and I’ll burn it.

Brent: Okay.

David: So what I’m doing, I’m taking all those bad thoughts. And my military career, I bet we had these little green books we had that we kept our notes in, our mission notes. Probably about 150, 200 pages. Those in the military knows what I’m talking about, memorandum books.

Brent: We call them the knowledge.

David: Yeah, the green ones, you know what I’m talking about.

Brent: Get your knowledge.

David: But, I mean, for my entire 32 years of my military career, I carried one in my pocket.

Brent: Oh, wow.

David: And so when I retired, I had about 150 books. And somebody had some pretty decent information in it that didn’t need to get out. So I had a burn party one night.

Brent: Yeah, I understand it.

David: Popped a cork on a bourbon bottle and lit up a bonfire and burned every one of them.

Brent: Well, it’s like burning your bridges. It’s all like a Viking funeral. It’s like, we’re just going to burn this dead past thing and start a new chapter.

David: And move forward.

Brent: Start a new chapter. It’s over with.

David: I’m not in the military anymore. Get rid of it. Move on.

Brent: Right. Absolutely.

David: So we burn it all. There’s a lot of different things that you do to move forward. Journalism is one of the best, I find.

Brent: I agree. I found it useful in so many things.

David: Stay away from the bottle. Yeah. It’s not helpful.

Announcer: This is the Full Mental Bracket. Full Mental Bracket.

Brent: So tell us a little bit, you talked a little bit earlier, tell me about your three circles model of community.

David: I call it my circle of friends, circle of, three circles of friendship, basically. My first circle is very small. And it’s my wife, my children, and those that are very close to me. And it’s not necessarily all your family. There’s a couple of my veterans, brothers that I serve with, and sisters that are in this family, this smaller circle. And that’s a protected, very protected circle. You guard that circle with your life, everything with your life. And I have a little bit larger circle, and that circle’s made up of acquaintances, dear friends, brothers that you serve with, sisters you serve with, and those are the ones that you might go to work with, or you just work. That’s just another, that’s just a little bit further out. I don’t quite hold them as close as I do that little, smaller circle. Then I have the large outer circle. That’s that, that’s your Facebook friends. Those are the ones, that’s your acquaintances. Those are the ones out there that you just keep in contact with because you, you know, we’re trying to figure out what they’re doing. You know, let me see what they’re doing. I’m going to stay there friends. I want to figure out what’s going on. And, uh, that outer circle to me is, is, is, is there for, uh, I call myself, I reach into a circle sometimes and I pull into a smaller circle. I’ll take one out of a smaller circle and I’ll put them a little further out. Just kind of manage your circles. Manage your circle of friends. People get crazy with it. They get so upset because they lose a friend. Or somebody don’t talk to them. You didn’t text me back yesterday, why? That’s why I have them circles. If you can be that way, I’ll move you out to a different circle.

Brent: I have noticed that you’re more social and more networky than I am. You seem to have a lot of people in your network.

David: Well, I try to be. I’m not as good as I used to be at it. I’ve had some really good networking and marketing coaches over the last several years to draw me out of my military presence and draw me back into the civilian world, which I’m not doing too well at. They say it’s like pulling me through fire, kicking and screaming. It’s just hard to get away from this military. You’ve been there 32 years of your life, and your dad was in the military, and he retired, and then my grandfather was in the military, so it’s kind of hard to get away from it.

Brent: I mean, I like, and I like your circle model. It seems to really, it seems to connect with our idea of, like, finding your tribe. Because you don’t ever do your quest alone. You definitely don’t do a military thing alone. All these Hollywood movies where, you know, you got John Wayne or John Wick or whatever, and they’re all by themselves. That is incredibly unrealistic. You have a team.

David: It is not going to happen.

Brent: You’ve always got somebody carrying your back. Someone’s carrying the radio, someone’s carrying the first aid kit, someone’s

David: Carrying ammo

Brent: carrying ammo, someone’s carrying food. You can’t carry it all.

David: Beans, bullets, and blankets. Somebody’s got to be there for you.

Brent: I think that’s the motto. You can’t carry it all.

David: No, and that’s why you’ve got the circle, the small circle, you depend on to help you as you step out to the larger circles.

Brent: So the smaller circles, you go in deeper than the wider circles.

David: You do. Yeah. And you just, they know more secrets.

Brent: That’s true. That’s true.

David: They know where their bodies lie.

Brent: Yeah, I had a similar model like that. It was kind of like an inverted pyramid.

David: Yeah. I’ve seen that one too.

Brent: And so you can go, you can go deep with a lot of, you can go shallow with a lot of people, but there’s going to be a handful that you really go deep with. And I think that’s natural. You can only go, there’s only, you only have so much bandwidth. You can’t be everyone’s bestie.

David: And that’s, that’s the problem with the youth today is they think that they need to be friends with everybody and best friends with everybody. I don’t have time for that.

Brent: I would say, I would talk about people maybe that were raised more natively to social media and I don’t think maybe they don’t fully understand what it means to be a close friend in real life. Maybe that everyone has more acquaintance, maybe what they define their acquaintances as friends because they never actually don’t have a lot of experience with actual real deep friends.

David: Right. Right. I wish they would learn it. It would be helpful.

Brent: It’s going to be good for them and good for everyone.

David: Make you a good friend out there and stick to them. I have my brothers and sisters call all the time. Sometimes when you feel down, we talk about some of these symptoms of PTSD. And it’s really weird that those people in that inner circle, it’s like they have that gut instinct, and they can feel when you’re down, and they give you a call, and out of nowhere, they’re talking to you, and you’re smiling, you’re laughing, and that feeling of anxiety starts to leave you, and you’re back.

Brent: All right, so you tend to make fun of my long words and my color crayons alternately. I’m going to throw out a new one for you. So there’s a term. It’s determined in the human biology, they talk about homeostasis. If you’re dehydrated, you get thirsty. If you’re hungry, you eat. If you’re hot, you sweat. If you’re cold, you shiver. The body’s always trying to maintain the balance. Well, there’s a version, psychologists have come up with a version of that with stress, and they call it, I guess they’re right, allostasis. Allostasis is like, is like releasing the stress hormones so you can rise to the occasion. It’s this whole thing about keeping you alive. It’s the same principle, keeping you alive by changing the balances in your body. So these guys went on to a second one, and they called this idea, and it hasn’t really caught on to mainstream yet, but I came across it somehow, social allostasis. It’s like your circle helps you manage your stress and your emotions.

David: That’s true.

Brent: You’re like, man, I just had this crazy thing happen. Well, tell me about it, you know, and maybe it’s your outer friends, maybe it’s your inner circle, but they, they, by listening to you and calming you down, maybe giving you good advice, maybe reminding you to decatastrophize, you, they help you lower your stress chemicals.

David: Obviously. And one thing that I was, I just wrote this down because I, Subject matter experts. That’s some big words there.

Brent: Yes. SMEs.

David: Those people are the ones that you keep at different levels in your circle so you can reach out and pull them in. Because they’re experts. Somebody might be an expert at dealing with ex-wives or dealing with children that are absolutely crazy. Reach out there for their help.

Brent: My kids will call me up and they say, hey, so about this complicated paperwork or my FAFSA or something, I’m like, I think you meant to call your mom. She’s the SME on paperworks and bureaucracy. You call me about different things.

David:I tell them to call my wife all the time because I don’t know nothing.

Brent: Yeah, I’m into it. But that’s the thing. You have your specialties.

David: Yeah, I do. I do have my specialties.

Brent: There would be, like, if someone had a difficult situation at work and they were trying to figure out how to manage people, they would usually call me. They were trying to figure out how to do their taxes, they would call her. Just because you’re the SMEs in the circle.

David: That’s what they need. Taxes and anything to do with money, you call my wife.

Brent: I like it.

David: Anything to do with anything else, call me. I’ll tell you how to mess it up.

Brent: So tell us a little bit about, so I heard that you found a stowaway on your property one day.

David: Oh my goodness. You want the backstory? We got time?

Brent: Let’s just go for the discovery.

David: I’ll go for discovery. I’m going to have to summarize it just a little bit because 20-something years ago, I had a golden retriever that was absolutely beautiful and got stolen from me, and I swore I’d never have another dog, and we’d perched with

Brent: but all right that sounds like you’re your wound and your flawed model of the world. It’s your back story. A grudge against dog thieves.

David: I was mad because so I was grudging against dog thieves, and and so we got us an English Springer Spaniel We drove last January like actually in the snowstorm all the way to Dayton, Ohio to get this dog, and back in the snow Lost my mind.

Brent: We’re going to clarify here that although the jarheads are a stereotype to be foolish, you drove through a blizzard to get a dog.

David: I lost my mind.

Brent: I just want to be clear that there’s enough crazy to go around.

David: Well, you know, everybody said you need to get a dog. It helps you with the PTSD. You need to get a dog.

Brent: Yeah, but they didn’t say a blizzard, did they?

David: No, they didn’t.

Brent: OK, you added that yourself.

David: Yeah, and I said, well, you know, it’s part of life. Deal with it. So we get the dog. And so last June, I was on my way to Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day. And this yellow dog comes up. It’s been coming up on the back of the property and getting up under my motorcycle trailer and getting out of the heat, in the shade, because it was nice and cool back there. And my wife would go down, take him water and some food.

Brent: And he wasn’t invited. He was like an interloper.

David: He just appeared out of nowhere. He’d wander up and wander out. He’d show up one day, be dirty. Next day, he’d be clean. It was like craziness. And so I went on to Normandy for the trip. And when I come back, the dog was still there. And my wife had gotten pretty, he’d come up to her, but just wouldn’t follow around. He wouldn’t, of course, the yard wasn’t fenced, except for the fenced area around the pool area. And the other, the Springer Spaniel would stay up there, so he’d come up and visit with Springer Spaniel, but wouldn’t stay up there for long. So I said, well, we gotta figure out what we’re gonna do with this dog. So I went out to, it was a pretty good walk, probably about 200, 300 feet to the back of the property there. I took the water and some food out to him, and I sat down on the ground right by that trailer. Right beside the trailer in the shade, sat down with the chiggers and ants, and he came out, crawled out from under, and I took the water out of the bowl. He drank water out of my hands and then took food out of my hands. And he ate the food out of my hands.

Brent: And you were bonding with him?

David: I was bonding with him, showing him that I wasn’t going to hurt him because I didn’t know his history. And I’m not a pet trainer by no means or a pet expert or a dog expert for that matter, but I just knew what my dad told me many, many years ago. You treat a dog the way you want to be treated.

Brent: That’s a good advice.

David: And if you want to be loved, you treat the dog with love and tenderness. So I treated him with love and tenderness. And eventually we got him to, my daughter had came and my granddaughter, and they had come up from Florida and we decided we were going to take him to the vet and figure out what’s wrong with him. And he was, his tail was eat up, all the hair off his tail was gone. He was eat up with bugs and everything. So we took him, got him in the car.

Brent: There was like a stick in his mouth?

David: There was a stick stuck sideways in the roof of his mouth. We didn’t know that at the time.

Brent: Like a bone piercing?

David: Right. It was just stuck up in there. Poor baby had been so hungry he was eating sticks.

Brent: Oh man.

David: And I couldn’t imagine that. Had the surgery done, had that removed, had him dipped, had him taken care of the bugs, and had him checked out. He should have been weighing about 80 pounds. He didn’t weigh but about 40, maybe 50 pounds. And so we brought him back and we decided where we were going. He was just so kind, so gentle, just very protective. He’s a Great Pyrenees mix. He’s got, I think, 50% Great Pyrenees, 25% Husky, Siberian Husky, and then the rest of it’s mutt.

Brent: But then you had him trained though.

David: Yeah, we took him to get trained. A friend of mine up in Somerville, Josh, is K-9 veterans, veteran K-9, I get it right. Anyway, I took him up there and he trains dogs.

Brent: So he was training to be an emotional support dog.

David: PTSD dog, a service dog. And so I said, we’ll pay for him to be trained and Josh, you find somebody for him. we’ll help you find a veteran for him. Because Yellow Dog, as we called him then, his name ended up being Charlie. And he was so protective and so loving and so gentle. He had such a gentle soul about him. We ended up being there about seven weeks in that time process. We were getting ready to pick him up and my youngest daughter, who was 38 at the time, was in a horrific accident and we lost her. And so he was very kind and he kept her, kept him for another week and a half while we, you know, managed that situation.

Brent: You were supposed to pick him up the next day.

David: And I told him at that time, I said, we’re going to keep him. And I said, we’re not, we just keep him. And actually I had already told him that we were going to keep him because he done found a place in my heart. But he’s been a, Charlie’s been a, a special gift. He keeps me calm when sometimes when I feel a little anxious, I think he senses it.

Brent: So you had him trained to be a companion for a vet with emotional stress and it turned out that that person was you.

David: Who would have thunk it? You know, cause he was just, I didn’t think I was in that kind of shape, but you know, people who have PTSD don’t realize they have PTSD or the depth of it.

Brent: And we talked about the bandwidth thing and losing a child is unimaginable. But talk about the bandwidth constriction there. All of your symptoms out on the, on the table.

David: And he was just, uh, He’s made a couple trips with me down to Florida. That’s great. He goes around, I take him to Tractor Supply. I don’t take him to a lot of places because he’s so big. He’s beautiful now. He weighs almost 80 pounds. He’s got a full tail, a beautiful gold hair, just a magnificent. love and he smiles at me. He goes, ha, ha, ha, ha, smiles at me. He’s got so much hair though, we have to vacuum five times a day.

Brent: The sacrifice, that’s the cost.

David:It’s the cost of it. And I have to work and I have to come home and clean up the dog hair. But he’s just been a Life-saving, I guess. You know, you’ve got so much other events that went along in your life prior to the disaster, to the loss, then the loss hits you.

Brent: Like we were talking about, when you have a pre-existing trauma, PTSD, you get hit twice as hard the next time.

David:It’s like hitting myself in the hand again with a hammer.

Brent: It’s like having a crack in a rock.

David: We hit you again and the crack just gets bigger and bigger. And hopefully it don’t break. But it was a lot of help for me. And if you got, think that you can use a service dog, I highly recommend you looking into it because it’s a very, he’s a, both of them are actually, the English Springer Spaniel, his name’s Granger. And he’s a part of the, like a two for, you get two for one.

Brent: So, but you’d recommend anyone with any sort of emotional struggles, you’d recommend one of these dogs.

David: I do. And don’t go in and select the dog, because the dog’s going to select you.

Brent: Oh, that’s a good point. That’s a good point.

David: I didn’t pick Charlie up. Charlie picked us out.

Brent: So, David, I had a thought after you told me this story the first time. And I want to see what you think about this. It occurs to me that maybe Yellow Dog functions as a metaphor for the trauma itself. Like you, no one was looking for him. No one asked for him. He just showed up, but instead of running away, instead of ignoring him, but you’d see you instead of ignoring him, trying to kick him and try to drive him away. You look for a way to heal. You look for a way to heal Yellow Dog.

David: I did. And initially, the first thought with the dog out there is, I hope that dog goes away. Yeah, I mean, that’s the… I mean, you need to go away, find your home, go back home. And then as… As my wife kept feeding him, and then we kept looking at him and talking to him and experiencing him, we just realized that.

Brent: Well, that’s the opening of the story format. Maybe I don’t have to deal with this problem. Maybe if I stick my head in the sand, the problem will go away.

David: And it didn’t go away.

Brent: The problem usually kicks you in the butt instead.

David: And it got deep in my wallet. But it’s worth every penny. And I don’t know how I ever managed all these years without a canine buddy.

Brent: But that’s the beauty of the thing with the with yellow dog and with the trauma Is that you turned it around for good? What was showed up as this unrecognized demand You you faced it down you healed it up and then it became a source of strength for yourself and for others. And that’s the thing is if you can If you can heal, if we talk about, we like to talk about the hero’s journey, but a real simplified version is that you have a departure, you leave, you have an initiation where you face all these struggles, and you have the return where you come back with the lessons. And you can apply that, and many people have, to facing down your trauma and recovery.

David: Absolutely, and the biggest thing we have to realize is that through this process, the only person that can heal you is you. Nobody else in your circle can heal you.

Brent: And it’s not an easy story, because you have to face all that fear. You have to face all that helplessness. You kind of have to go back into the thing that broke you the first time.

David: And how’s it called? Reconfigure. Reconfigure. Reconfigure your mind and your heart to be able to accept it.

Brent: But if you can do that, then you come back healthier. You come back maybe not fully healed, or maybe a cycle you have to do over and over again. But you come back healed-er. And you come back with a legacy. You are healthier for your family. You can be healthier for other people with PTSD, and you can help share your wisdom.

David: That’s key. And a leader, and I’m not calling myself a terrific leader, but at least I think I was pretty decent. knows when to lead. And they know when to back off. And I knew that I had to make myself better because there’s too many people still dependent upon me. I can’t dwell in the past. I can’t dwell on my losses. I can’t dwell on You know, as my mom used to say, if a frog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his butt every time he jumped.

Brent: That’s right.

David: So I don’t do the ifs. I’ve stopped doing the ifs.

Brent: Well, I think there comes a point, and maybe not for everyone, but there comes a point with age, and at least with some amount of maturity, is you realize, like, this is on me. I am the leader here, you know. My dad died, and we were fairly close, but I didn’t go to him for a lot of practical advice. He was a different, he was me in a different area. If you had a question about the Bible, you’d ask him. If you had a question about actual practical things, maybe he wasn’t the SME you were talking to. But when he left, when he left me, I just felt this weight. It was like I never, maybe I didn’t use my phone a friend a lot, but I had that phone a friend. And then I didn’t.

David: And you look back on it and say, well, I wish I had.

Brent: Right. And so, I mean, I’m not a big fan of the patriarchy, but I felt like I was the patriarch. And there was just the responsibility on my shoulders. I’ve got three kids. I have soon to have four grandkids. And I got people that I’m just like. All the buck stops with me. And maybe I’m over…I mean, that’s how I felt. I’m not saying literally everyone. That I need to answer everyone’s questions, God forbid. But I felt that responsibility.

David: You had to step up to the plate.

Brent: I had to step up to the plate. Now, in a story framework, I could have run away. I could have had a midlife crisis in a sports car, an alcoholic bender or something. But that’s not the choice that you made. It’s not the choice that I made.

David: And I think a lot of that’s got to do to our military training.

Brent: Well, you got to face up to, you know, you can’t run away. You know, there’s people counting on you.

David: And that’s important is that once you realize, once an individual realizes in their suffering that they are, other people depend upon them for something.

Brent: So one thing about the military is it’s taken them a long time to get serious about mental health.

David: It has.

Brent: Yeah. Being dependable, I think is going to be one of the key benefits of the military. Learning how to be useful, how to be dependable, how to minimize your own ego and hurts long enough to get the job done.

David: Absolutely.

Brent: And once the job’s done, then there’d be like some complaining and some whining and stuff, but you get the job done.

David: You get the job done and just break out the bourbon afterwards.

Brent: Yes, absolutely.

David: But the hardest part to growing through the trauma is the realization that you’ve got the trauma, that you discovered the trauma, Understand the trauma, work through the trauma, and realize you got the trauma, it’s not going away. It’s not going away. You can complain, you can fuss, you can fight, you can drink, you can take a pill, it’s not going away.

Brent: That’s the story format, is the try-fail cycle. If you quit, then the story is over, but you may not succeed the first time, or the first 20 times, But the story is that you are rising up again. You’re putting in a new chapter, a new fight. You are slowly learning. You may not master your trauma, but you’re learning your triggers better. You’re learning how to deal with it better. You’re learning how to not take it out on your loved ones as much.

David: If you remove yourself from the story, The story continues.

Brent: Yes. Remove yourself from the equation. It’s not about me and my pain. It’s about the bigger story. That’s one of the beauty of the story. It’s the psychological distance. You’re like, well, if it was Tom Cruise instead of me, what would I like to see in the story?

David: Absolutely.

Brent: Well, that sounds like a lot. Well, that’s a lot of work for Tom, but he gets paid a lot. But no, now you got to do it. Well, no, no, no, no, no. Hold on. Let’s not get too excited here.

David: It’s a critical phase. And once you get to the healing part and you realize that, OK, I have to step up, I guess, step up to the plate. I remember my first sergeant, he’d tell you, you need to step up to the plate, Spencer, and make it happen, and that’s what you have to do, and that’s what, I think we miss a lot of that in our circles, is putting that out there for them to be able to understand, you have to step up to the plate.

Brent: And just to clarify for people who may not be as familiar with this concept, we’re not talking about the eternal grind, we’re not talking about sucking up every possible torment, but we’re talking about realizing that there’s always going to be pain, there’s always going to be discomfort, that some things are worth, some things are important and you have to rise above what you feel like doing.

David: I think my success with it, and I’m not completely successful, is I categorize it. Is that the right word?

Brent: I think so. I like it.

David:I can’t spell it, but we’re going to make it work. But I put everything in a category, and then I work through it one at a time. Because I’ve come to realize through my management style that if I try to I had to take all these categories together and try to work on them all at the same time. I am not going to do that good of a job.

Brent: So as a classic combat strategist, you divide and conquer.

David: I do.

Brent: You divide and conquer.

David: I do.

Brent: I think that’s a great tip. And the other tip, we’re going to kind of wrap this up. But the final tip is that, as we mentioned so many times on this show, there’s pleasure and there’s purpose. And with the rising up, it can be unpleasurable. It can be unpleasant. But it’s for purpose.

David: And it wins.

Brent: And it wins. And sometimes that purpose is satisfying far longer than that pleasure would be.

David: And I think the biggest problem since the biggest thing that we have to realize is that we have to realize we have post-traumatic stress and that the trauma is there and learn how to deal with it. And say, OK, I accept it. Brent and I’ve got post-traumatic stress. I’ve been through trauma and I accept it and I’m working on it. It’s hard.

Brent: I’ve been through a fair amount of trauma. I don’t know if I have PTSD. Maybe I’m in denial. I don’t know.

David: You are.

Brent: But I like, but I like, I like that. And you have to, you know, something we like to say at my house is like, if everywhere you go, everyone has the same problem, then the problem might be you. And if everyone, if everyone is just rude to you and can’t get along with you, and maybe you have the problem, maybe it is PTSD. If everywhere you go, everyone rubs you the wrong way,

David: then it’s gotta be you.

Brent: Maybe you’re the sandpaper.

David: You’re the rough edge.

Brent: So consider that, Bracketeers. See someone if you need to. This has been a great episode.

David: Yeah, thank you so much.

Brent: David Spencer, Bracketeer on the Bracket.

David: On the Bracket. I am a Bracketeer.

Brent: Full circle recursive bracketation.

David: And share the episodes.

Brent: Yes. Oh, yes. And so… If you’re a Bracketeer, you’ll be happy to share our episodes with your friends and neighbors. And if you don’t share them, are they really your friends because you’re withholding all the good stuff?

David: I share. Hit the like button.

Brent: Okay. Thank you again. We will see you for our next episode. Goodbye.

Announcer: Full Mental Bracket podcast hosted by Brent Diggs. Executive producer, Brody Scott. Art design, Colby Osborne. Interact with the show at FullMentalBracket.com. This is The Full Mental Bracket. This is a Brody Scott production.

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