Trauma Is What Happens Inside You

Good morning my friend, I hope you're doing well. It's Sunday.

I don't normally give you a new episode on Sunday, but I've got something for you from

the past because somebody is hurting this morning over some trauma that hasn't resolved

and this episode is going to help you unpack that.

Just felt really strongly that I was supposed to release this today.

If it's for you, let me know, Lee at DrLeeWarren.com.

Hope this is helpful. Remember friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.

And I got one question for you today. Hey, are you ready to change your life?

If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place for the neuroscience

of how your mind works, smashes together with faith and everything starts to make sense.

Are you ready to change your life?

Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired, take control of our thinking and find real hope.

This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready?

This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your time, my friend.

Let's get after it.

Music.

I was thinking about trauma a lot lately. just finished the probably last round of little tiny little edits little proof

reading stuff back and forth with the proofreaders and editors at Penguin Random House in Waterbrook. So my book Hope is the First Dose should be heading

to print very soon. We're gathering up the very last few endorsements. We've got

just incredible headwind, I'm sorry tailwind behind this book. Boy the last.

Book, I've seen the interview, had great support from the publisher, but talk

about a headwind. That book launched on January 7th of 2020, which was the week

so we were at least an hour in New York City. We had all these media appearances,

Fox and Friends and all these things teed up.

And we got there to the city on Sunday. We're supposed to be at Fox & Friends on Tuesday

when the book came out and we got word Wednesday, or I'm sorry, we got word Monday night of that week,

January 6th, 2020, that they were impeaching the president and that was gonna be all they talked about

on the news the next day.

So just, they said, stay in the city, we'll get to you in a day or two.

So we had all these other radio shows and all this stuff.

But one by one, all the TV appearances just got canceled.

The Tuesday was impeaching the president, Wednesday, the Australian wildfires, another day the royal family was blowing up, another

day the news of this viral pandemic coming out of China was happening.

So just every single day of that week something happened and of course, you know, within a

couple of weeks of that book launch, everybody was talking about one thing and that was COVID-19.

And so that book, even though it was, I think, a tremendously helpful book, and it did very

well when a Christian book award is still selling and all of that but it

just had it got buried right by events going on in the world so this book hope

is the first dose I think is going to launch it hopefully a calmer time in

world history and have less noise around it so maybe more people hear about it I

think it's it's got a message that's going to also elevate and help I've seen the interview so just be praying about that that the world will be a

a fairly quiet place in July of this year,

but we're excited about the book coming out.

But in the grand scheme of things, I've been thinking about trauma a lot.

This book covers, it's the subtitle, Hope is the First Dose,

a treatment plan for trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

A treatment plan for recovering from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

So we talk a lot about trauma and the things that we encounter in our lives in this book.

And as I was writing it...

I talked a little bit about what Bessel van der Kolk writes in his book,

The Body Keeps the Score, which is one of the best books of how the brain and the body respond to trauma.

And he talks about this principle of trauma-informed care, which is really important now when we take care of somebody,

to understand what all they've been through, what their previous history is,

and that affects how you process and handle injury and illness now.

So we used to say, when we would see somebody behaving a certain way,

we would say something like, what's wrong with you? What's the matter with you? Why are you acting like that?

Now we've learned, hopefully most of us who are practicing medicine nowadays,

have a more what happened to you approach.

We understand that the way you're presenting now, physically, mentally, psychiatrically, emotionally, behaviorally,

all these things are impacted by the things that have happened to you in the past,

not just the medical things, but the traumas and the tragedies and the things that have occurred in your past.

It all affects how you present now. So we've learned how to say what happened,

like to start trying to be informed about your previous history.

Well, as I finished up the edits of that book, I just am also currently reading a book

by Dr. Gabriel Maté called The Myth of Normal.

It's kind of blowing my mind. So Gabriel Maté is a doctor who's written a lot about addiction and trauma

and ADHD and all kinds of things.

And he has a phrase about trauma that I never heard it put this way.

Here's a snip from YouTube of one of his interviews of what he said about trauma.

So the subtle difference between what I said, which is the difference between what is wrong with you

and what happened to you, that's subtle, but he even says it in a better way.

Here's what Gabriel Monte said.

Trauma again is not what happened to you, it's what happened inside you as a result of what happened to you.

And that's the good news.

As if trauma was what happened to you.

That somebody sexually abused you, or that your parents died in a war.

If that was the trauma, there's nothing you can do to change that.

That happened. It was never not going to have happened.

But if the trauma is the wound that you incurred inwardly, you can heal that wound at any time.

So actually, recognizing what trauma is as an internal psychological wound with manifestations in your body, actually allows you to heal it.

Trauma game. And that's beautiful. It's this idea you can heal once you name it, once you understand not just what happened to you, what was the actual event, but what it did inside you.

So that's a little bit more subtle and more nuanced way to describe it.

He said in another one of his interviews, I'm going to give you a quote.

If trauma is what happened to you, guess what? It will never unhappen.

But if trauma is what happened inside you, the wound that you sustained, the meaning

you made of it, the way you then came to believe certain things about yourself or the world

or other people, and if trauma was that disconnection from your authentic self, well, good news,

that can be restored or healed at any moment.

So it's subtle, but so trauma is not just what happened to you, but more importantly,

it's the wound inside you, and that's why you can believe that there's a hope and a

future and something can be healed and done because God can heal anything but.

He won't undo the fact that something happened to you it becomes part of your

story so I thought I'd bring you back today way back episode from way back in season one.

I got an email from somebody who had been in Iraq from me and asked me some questions about trauma

and how he was processing it.

And I did an episode back in season one about my experience of PTSD from being in the war.

And I thought it might be a good time to share that with you just to remind you,

hey, I'm here behind this microphone every day, but I'm also a guy who's been through some stuff

just like you have, and I have a story.

And so this is part of my story and part of my way to answer the email that I got from my colleague.

And it's a little bit about what happened to me and what happened inside me.

And you can use it to be able to name and know your own trauma and then learn to heal from it.

And there's some good stuff in here. I think it's helpful.

And it's just a good way back Wednesday episode. So we're gonna do that for you today.

I'm gonna give it to you starting in just a second here, but recommend highly Bessel van der Kolk's book,

The Body Keeps the Score. And Gabriel Montes books have been helpful to me as well.

So, I'll put some links in the show notes and I just want to give you this episode back

about what happened to me in my experience with war and post-traumatic stress and as

a way to kind of help you understand the questions you need to start asking aren't what happened,

but what happened inside.

And once you understand the wound, you can begin to heal it.

I can't fix a brain tumor if I don't diagnose it first.

I can't fix your back if I don't know what the diagnosis is.

Once you understand what the actual wound is, that's when the magic can begin to happen.

That's when the miracle can start to happen. That's when Jesus can help you.

When you name it, you can know it, and when you know it, you can heal it.

And you can start today. Here's the old episode. I'll talk to you tomorrow.

Good morning, my friend.

It's early morning, super dark outside. It is September 2nd,

and I'm bringing you kind of a weird episode this morning that shouldn't surprise you by now, I guess,

if you've been listening to me for a while.

But something different today. I got an email two days ago from a guy who was in Iraq with me.

We'll call him John, that's not his real name, but I don't have his permission yet to share his story.

So I'm gonna change a little bit of what we talk about today just to protect his identity.

So we'll call him John. But he sent me an email and it just kind of blew me up.

It took me right back to Iraq to the feelings that I had dealing with a lot of the things that happened over there.

And if you don't know my Iraq story, um...

Maybe I'll share more sometime, but there's a lot out there.

You can go to my website. My first book, No Place to Hide, really deals with the trauma.

That we faced in Iraq in combat surgery.

And anyway, that's a big part of my story. And I don't talk about it a lot since the time since then.

We've been through so much more, especially losing a child.

That's kind of defined my platform and learning how to recover from hard things and all of that.

But it started with my story of being in Iraq.

And I feel bad when I get emails like that, like I got from my friend John last night,

or not before last, rather, because I realized I haven't really spent a lot of time

with the veteran community since I got home from the war.

I mean, one of the ways that I dealt with it was to sort of just not think about it for a long time.

And as I began to ride and develop more of a platform, it really, like I said, kind of built up

around the experience of losing a child and I never really tied it back to the veteran community.

I love our community, I love our veterans, I love our country, and I interact with them all the time.

And my book was really well received in that community. It was in fact named to the 2015 United States

Air Force Chief of Staff's Professional Reading List.

But I never got involved in the sense that, you know, I never really spoke to veterans groups much

and got really connected back to that part of my history.

I just kept myself from plunging into that culture, I think, out of sort of self-preservation.

And so this email that I received the night before last kind of broke me open because

it's about the impact that our time in Iraq together had on one man and his family.

And he asked me some questions that kept me up.

The last two nights really tossing and turning and not sleeping well because I realized

that we all need to talk about these kinds of things when we go through hard things.

We need to talk about them.

And today we're gonna go deep into what happens when you face the biggest trauma of your life

and what happens after just looking at my story and my experience as a template for that.

I haven't made many notes on this. I'm not really prepared to do an episode like I normally am.

So I hope you'll forgive me if I ramble a little bit because this is really just gonna be an honest conversation

about what happens when you face the biggest hard thing in your life and what happens after that.

So, we're gonna get real here for a little bit about how you find your feet again

after you come home from whatever version of war your life might plop you down into,

and we're gonna do that starting today.

Hey, are you ready to change your life?

If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first.

And my friend, there's a place where the neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith,

and everything starts to make sense.

That place is called self-brain surgery. You can learn it and it will help you become healthier,

feel better and be happier.

And the good news is, you can start today.

Thanks Lisa. Hey, so glad to have you listening today. I'm Dr. Lee Warren and I live in Nebraska in the United States of America

with my incredible wife Lisa, my father-in-law Tata, and the super pups Harvey and Louis.

I'm a neurosurgeon and an author and I'm here to help you harness neuroscience, the power of your brain,

faith, the power of your spirit, and good old common sense to help you lead a healthier, better, happier life.

Listen friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind and I'm here to help you learn the art of self brain surgery to get it done.

And if you'd like to share, please subscribe so you never miss an episode and tell your friends about it.

If you tell two or three friends this podcast was helpful to you, imagine how much good,

we can all do around the world together.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren and I'm here to help you change your mind so you can change your life. Let's get after it.

Okay, I'm going to share with you some excerpts from this email that I received from a man

that we'll call John.

He was in Iraq with me, another healthcare provider, and haven't really, I have not seen

I haven't seen him since we were there, which is amazingly enough 15 years ago now.

It's amazing that something that happened 15 years ago can affect so much of your daily life, but it can.

And it does with me every day.

I haven't seen him, haven't heard from him. Two years ago I got an email from him

that he had run across some mutual friends at a wedding and somehow they got to talking about stuff

and figured out that they both knew me and he reached out and just said,

hey, by the way, I remember you from Iraq, and well, but this email was different

because he really made something personal happen.

So I'm gonna read you some excerpts from John's email.

Here we go.

I'm reaching out to you because I am finally getting around to dealing with my experience in Iraq.

I've never really, quote, processed my experiences there.

I'm seeing a Christian counselor who's a really good guy and through talking with him, I've had this profound desire

to reconnect with people I went through that experience with.

I'm just curious, have you ever had difficulty in dealing with some of the memories of that

time period like guilt or confusion or anger.

I've really struggled with anger, and even with rage, I don't really know what I'm trying to ask

other than to say, do you think it had a tremendous impact on our lives?

And if so, how have you contextualized that and been able to move forward?

Because I don't think I ever really dealt with it effectively.

I'm just trying to make sense of some things so that I can help my marriage, my family life,

and my peace of mind.

That's his email. Look, I am an expert in taking years to deal with something,

So he's not alone in taking 15 years to manage this thing.

And that's actually the whole story of why I wrote No Place to Hide.

If you haven't read that book, not plugging my book here,

but I just tell the story of how it was basically

five years after I got home from the war before I dealt with it, after I went crazy.

I literally never even opened my trunk that was full of war stuff, all my uniforms

and mementos of the shrapnel and bullets and bomb fragments that we took out of people's brains

that I brought home for teaching purposes.

I never took them out of the trunk until I had to.

We watched a show on HBO called Generation Kill that was about troops that were getting hurt

and going to blood, and that was my hospital.

And after we watched it, Lisa and I watched the show together.

And after that, I started having nightmares and flashbacks and almost spells where I would check out

and not be able to talk for a few minutes.

I had some really weird symptoms and ultimately figured out that it was PTSD.

And that show had unroofed it and brought it out and brought all that stuff flooding back into my life.

And Lisa and a friend of ours who was a psychiatrist that we just chatted with about it,

encouraged me to write all that stuff down and that journaling and writing process

ultimately turned into the book No Place to Hide.

So I'm an expert in not dealing with something in a timely fashion, so John's not alone there.

And here's what I wrote back to him. So I'm just gonna share you part of what I wrote back

to John and then we'll talk some more. Here we go.

I am so glad that you reached out and that you shared your situation with me.

I had a lot of trouble processing Iraq as well.

In fact, I wrote my first book as therapy for myself in unpacking all that stuff.

No place to hide.

I can honestly say that no time in my life has left a deeper and more transformative mark on me.

I think about it every time I operate, every time I see a soldier in uniform or an old

vet in my office and I tell so many stories that start with in Iraq, yet it affected my

faith, my heart, my relationships, and my family in good and in bad ways. It still does.

One thing it did is it stunted me emotionally. I can't tell you how many times. I used to

be a really funny guy. In fact, when I was a kid, I told jokes at county fairs and talent

shows. I was a stand-up comedian. But when I came home from Iraq, I was different. I

can't tell you how many times Lisa's made a joke and I responded in some way that I

thought was appropriate and she'll say hey I was joking and I'll say I know I

I thought I laughed.

When our son died in 2013, that was the closest I've ever felt to the helplessness I felt

since the time I got stuck outside during a mortar attack in Iraq, except the mortars

were the funeral home and the cops in the empty bedroom in our house, the missing seat at the dinner table.

But at least in Alabama, I knew who the enemy was. The enemy was grief. It was obvious.

I couldn't put my finger on why Iraq was so bad, though. All of us as health care providers had seen lots of death and senseless tragedy.

We've seen lots of blood and burns and the like, but there it was happening because of reasons

that were harder to discern, and it felt suspicious to me the whole time while we were there.

One group hates another, one country wants something the other has,

one leader wants to kill somebody else, one tribe disagrees with another,

and all we could do was try to clean up the mess and stop the bleeding for one person at a time

and make those awful phone calls to the families back home.

But on the positive, I think it helped strip away my need for control.

It prepared me for greater losses that would come later in my life, like losing a child,

by teaching me that there's still hope around the corner, even when all seems lost, that the all clear

after the mortar attack will eventually sound out again.

Now, I've got no real answers for you, brother, but I validate your feelings.

Just keep talking about it so you don't make more casualties in your life

by being angry about things they can't understand

or making surrogate enemies out of innocent people.

My wife helped me so much once she convinced me to talk about it, and writing is how I did that.

So I'm still carrying it all, but I let her look into the pack, so to speak, and it helps.

So that's the letter I wrote back to John. And I just tried to share the fact that,

it really has been a profound experience.

He asked me, you know, is it wrong for me to feel all this stuff 15 years later?

Is it wrong for me to be so angry sometimes and not understand why I'm angry

and lash out at my wife and all of that stuff? And you know what? It's not wrong.

It's wrong to lash out at your wife, don't hear me say that.

But it's not wrong to feel all these things.

When you've been through something really hard in your life, even if it's 15 or 20 or 30 or 50

or 75 years later, if you've never dealt with it, it is absolutely natural for it to still be affecting you.

But one thing I want you to understand is that you can feel like you're all alone

and you can feel like something that you went through was purposeless and it was just senseless

and it didn't make any sense.

And you can feel like that your life was wrecked by that thing and if you'd only not been in that place

or been around those people or gone through that stuff, that you'd be different, that you would have

a different life, and you may be right.

And you might feel like that you were in this place and that God was not there, or that you can't find him,

that you're so hopelessly broken by this trauma or this experience that you can't find God or feel God,

or maybe he's not even really there.

You'll feel all of that stuff, but let me tell you something.

Acts 17, 26, and 27, Paul's talking, and he says, "'God made from one man every nation of mankind

"'to live on the face of the earth,

"'having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation

that they would seek God if perhaps they might grope for him and find him,

though he is not far from each one of us.

There's some powerful meat for your life right here in this verse, my friend,

because it says that God knew where you were going to be and when you were going to be there before he made you.

Let that sink in. He knew that you were gonna go through this hard thing that you went through.

And he knows that he's right there. If you're searching for him, you can grope,

sometimes it feels like groping around in the darkness for anything that can give you some hope.

And God says, I am not far from you.

Psalm 34, 18 says, God is close to the brokenhearted. And he is, my friends.

So the first thing I would suggest to you, if you're struggling, if you're suffering,

is to just realize that you are not alone.

It was not purposeless, it was not an accident that you went through all that stuff.

Doesn't make it good, doesn't make it right, doesn't make it something you should be thankful for

having happened to you.

It just means that God is still there with you in it if you will grope around long enough to find him. is not far.

Something happened to me, something occurred to me when I was in Iraq, you know, I was not prepared.

I did not feel prepared to go and do combat neurosurgery. I was trained in level one trauma centers

in the United States, of course, I knew how to take care of major trauma and all that stuff.

But when we got to Iraq, it was chaos. It was 20 people at the same time,

all with life-threatening injuries.

And we had to, for the first time, make triage decisions that actually means this guy gets to go to the OR first

and that guy has to bleed to death because this guy has a better chance.

Like we had to literally make those kinds of calls and you don't have to do that in the United States.

In the U.S., you've got five hospitals and 20 surgeons,

and endless blood product and limitless supplies and you never have to say, I'm gonna take care of this guy

and that guy I'm not gonna take care of.

You don't have to do that in the United States, but we had to in Iraq and I had to quickly learn

how to handle being shot at, mortared,

rocketed, power going off, darkness in the OR, operating in a tent, operating with limited supplies,

operating with hardly any blood product available.

We had multiple casualties for people overhead announcing that we needed people with B positive blood

to go down and donate blood.

Happened all the time. We'd be in the middle of something

and you would hear overhead, hey, we need B positive,

we need AB bloods, whoever's got that blood type come down and give bloods,

we're running out of blood product.

So we literally were giving our own blood to the soldiers we were taking care of.

You don't have to do that in the United States, friend. But what happened, it dawned on me.

There's this verse, this weird verse, Psalm 144, one that says,

Praise be to the Lord my rock, my redeemer, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.

It occurred to me while I was there that although I wasn't ready in my mind

I was ready in my spirit somehow. I didn't freak out when the bombs went off somehow

I was able to figure out how to take care of those really sick people somehow

I really was able to perform under all that stress. I'm not the most like,

resilient guy I didn't think and I'm certainly not like this big tough macho type guy that you would expect to go into that situation and stand

to stand up and deal with it properly, but I did, because God had prepared my hands.

He had trained my hands for war, even though I didn't realize it.

So I felt out of control. I felt like I had no place to hide.

I felt stuck. I felt really unprepared, but God got me through it.

I survived it, and I'm just telling you that now because it took me years to figure it out,

like why that matters, but it does matter. This idea that I'm still carrying that pack full of stuff,

it's really true.

Like, I can't tell you how many times I see something and I'm immediately transported back

to some situation in Iraq.

I'm always drawing parallels between what I'm feeling now and what I dealt with then.

I constantly tell stories in the operating room to try to give people context

for when we think something's hard here, what's really hard.

My kids have all heard those stories millions of times.

And I'm telling you that to tell you in a few minutes it's important to tell your story so I'll bring you back to that.

So again, it's not wrong, John, for you to be feeling these things.

It's not wrong for you to be angry, for you to be suffering with all of this stuff

15 years later because you've never unpacked it and you've never dealt with it.

And now it's time to do that.

Look, I'm no expert in dealing with PTSD, but that's what this is.

When you've got a bunch of symptoms that relate to a trauma that you've experienced in the past,

that's post-traumatic stress disorder.

And the Lord knows I made a mess of my own for a while. It took me years to figure out I was having it.

It took me years to finally listen to my wife and deal with it properly and stop having

all those troubles, but I still have some of it.

I still have nightmares from time to time. I still wake up and think about that stuff.

And it doesn't take much to set me off.

In fact, recently, when we moved to Nebraska, I had to go with Fiona, who's one of the hospital

administrators, and with Jim, who's one of the ER doctors, and with Neil, a helicopter pilot,

in a life flight helicopter, and we went all around the state of Nebraska

and northern Kansas to meet ER doctors

and referring physicians and providers at different hospitals to introduce them

to the idea that we had a neurosurgeon in North Platte now.

And I have to tell you that walking up to that helicopter really hurt me, because I haven't been in a helicopter

until, since I was in Iraq.

And the last time I was in a Black Hawk, we had a significant issue, had to land on a hostile highway

during a firefight after a bomb had gone off. We picked up a terrorist who had blown himself up,

and the guy was burning.

He'd been burned terribly, and he was literally dying right in front of me,

and I couldn't do anything to help him,

but I had to sit next to him on his helicopter ride back to our hospital and help unload him,

and his skin was peeling off, and he smelled like sulfur,

and he was moaning and writhing and just suffering greatly,

and all we could do was scoop him up and take him back to the hospital.

So we tried to save the guy who set this bomb off, and the last time I had been in a helicopter

was with that guy. So stepping onto that life flight helicopter the other day,

I smelled that smell again.

That smell of that burned up terrorist.

And I didn't say anything about it. And that's the thing about most of us that have trauma,

we don't usually go around talking about it.

But I dealt with that on that helicopter ride that day.

And I was able to say to myself, it's not happening now. It's not going to happen again.

We are not gonna land on the highway and pick up a terrorist today.

We're going down to a hospital and have lunch.

I knew that, and I was able to work through it.

But I'm just saying that to tell you that it is absolutely normal for these things

to pop back into your brain.

I'm always talking and writing about faith and hope and keeping a positive spirit during hard times.

And it's so important if you wanna have a happy life and be able to accomplish all the things

that God has in mind for you.

But it's not enough if you've experienced some kind of major trauma in your past

or your present life.

Some things we go through change us and we often need help to really deal with them

and heal from them and learn from them and learn how to move past them in our lives.

So let's just talk for a second about what post-traumatic stress disorder is.

And you can Google this, there's tons of resources out there, way more qualified than me to talk about it.

I'll put a link to a good article that I found, a website called betterhelp.com,

and I'll put a link in the show notes. That's just one of millions of resources.

The fact is, if you're interested in getting better from this, there are lots and lots of resources,

way more qualified than me, but I'm just trying to share my experience with you.

PTSD doesn't look the same in everybody. It's different for every person who encounters it.

Some people immediately go in to become symptomatic after something bad happens

and it comes to a head really quick. And other people, it lies like a seed in the ground

and doesn't come back up for five or 10 or 15 or 20 years until something else happens that triggers it.

That was my story.

It was five years later before I really had my big, big outbreak of symptoms.

So it happens differently in everybody and you need to understand what can happen

so you recognize it when it occurs.

But the four sort of big, big warning signs that you might have post-traumatic stress disorder

are these memories that are intrusive to your life.

All of a sudden, whatever you're dealing with right now in real time, you are overwhelmed with a memory

of something from the past during that event.

You're going, having lunch with your husband and all of a sudden you're remembering

very specific details about that sexual assault that you went through.

Or you're trying to take care of a patient in your clinic in Auburn, Alabama in 2011,

and all of a sudden you were seeing a burned up Iraqi terrorist in front of you,

and you can't process what's real and what's not.

Another symptom is avoiding it. So there's just this strong desire not to talk about and process

and actually think about the thing that you've been through.

Not to let other people know about it. Shame, having shameful feelings

that other people wouldn't want to hear about your trouble

because there's nothing wrong with you for having it, so you want to avoid it.

And then negative changes in your mood and your affect and how you think and how you feel.

If you're feeling all of a sudden that everything is negative and everything is dark,

that's sort of heading towards depression, and that's a sign of PTSD.

And then changes in how you react to things physically and emotionally.

For me, I noticed after the war for years, I couldn't deal with fireworks.

Like my kids, poor kids, didn't get to have fireworks because I couldn't handle it.

Those explosions and uncontrolled things that were happening in unpredictable ways around me,

firearms and fireworks, I couldn't deal with it.

My heart would race, I'd have to go sit in the car, like I couldn't deal with it.

I still can't use a porta-potty, by the way, that's a whole nother story, but I got mortared one day

while I was in a porta-potty and I had this image

of myself being blown up and put in a body bag covered in somebody else's excrement,

and they wouldn't have a closed casket because I would be so disgusting and covered with all this stuff.

So I still, to this day, I won't go into a porta potty because it just makes me feel all that horrible memory again

of something that didn't actually happen.

I didn't get blown up and die, by the way.

So changes in how you react when you see a certain thing. When I see a porta potty, when I hear a helicopter,

I have a certain set of emotional and physical reactions.

My heart races, I remember a lot of things, I get that sort of deep spirit disturbance

that I have when I actually went through those things in real life.

And the intensity of how you experience these symptoms can increase and decrease over time.

It's not constant and that's one of the hard things about it because you can't sometimes

predict when it's going to occur.

So, you'll find some things that may trigger your feelings, may trigger that anger, John,

may trigger the things that you feel.

For me, it's seeing a helicopter fly by, at least it used to be.

And sometimes these triggers can really set you off and you can go through a long period

of time of having more symptoms.

And one of the symptoms that is very common is anger.

It's a natural response to these hard things, these traumatic things.

And if you, or somebody that you love, by the way, has been harmed in some way,

has gone through this difficult trauma, it can be triggering of an onset of all these angry emotions.

Why did this happen to me? Why are you making it worse for me?

Why won't you listen to me? You can substitute the person in front of you

for whoever was responsible for your actual trauma.

That's PTSD. The anger doesn't go away like it does for some people.

It just stays there and boils and it's like a burr under your saddle and it won't stop.

And so if you've got this anger lying around right under your saddle ready to come out

at anything that provokes you, then people are in danger around you.

Friends and family and vulnerable people like children and wives and spouses who you're close to

can become what I called in my email to John's surrogate enemies.

Like they're not the problem.

They didn't put you in the war. They didn't do this thing to you.

But your anger comes out at them.

And that's gonna create some additional problems for you, friend.

That's gonna create some surrogate issues for you. They're not really your real issue,

but now you're blowing up your marriage. Now you're losing your job.

Now you're getting fired or laid off or your kids don't wanna spend time with you

because they're not safe around you because you have substituted the real problem

for being angry at them.

And that is a huge problem. If that's happening to you, then you need some help, my friend.

You've got to learn how to manage these symptoms and here are some tips.

The first one is what I called the other day, a couple of episodes ago, you have to name

something if you want to know it.

If I want to know what a tumor is that I see on an MRI, I've got to biopsy it so I can

name it. I can't treat it until I understand it. I can't fix it until I diagnose it.

And the same thing is true for you. You've got to recognize that you're angry and you've got to recognize that the anger

is coming from this traumatic experience that you went through.

So if you suffer from PTSD, you've got to identify the fact that you have it.

You've got to identify the fact that you're feeling it.

And there's different kinds of anger. I mean, there's good anger, so you could recognize

that you're angry and that will motivate you to go get some help.

And there's destructive or really bad anger, where you're blowing things up around you

and you're creating all kinds of havoc in your life and drinking too much or considering suicide

or getting a divorce or getting fired or alienating yourself from your family

because you're so angry all the time, that's not healthy and it's not going to last for you.

So, when you don't know how to handle your anger, it can cause you to overreact,

it can cause you to be overly harsh, it can cause you to really do some harm,

or if you hold it inside, then you're gonna need to treat it in some way,

and you're gonna probably treat it with alcohol or drugs or some other substitute of sex or pornography

or gambling or something, some other way to think about and feel something

other than what you're really feeling.

This is why 22 combat veterans commit suicide every day in the United States.

That's an unacceptable number. It's terribly high, but we can't fix it

if those folks aren't able to understand

what is happening to them.

If you don't understand, if you're not diagnosing it, and you're not getting the help that you need,

then we can't fix that for you, right?

Because the problem with PTSD and with any kind of mental issue

is that nobody else knows you're having it

if you're not willing to talk about it, right?

When you can recognize your anger though, that's when you can start dealing with it.

That's when you're gonna be able to understand that there's a way to process that anger

that will actually drive you to getting the help that you need.

And that's what I'm hoping for you, John. That's what I'm hoping for me.

Once you recognize and name the problem, here's some things that I've found that you can do.

Number one, be willing to get help. Be willing to ask somebody for help.

If it's your spouse, your chaplain, your pastor, your dad, your mom, somebody you trust in your life

who's gonna be reliable for you, don't tweet about it.

Don't post it on Facebook, because people are not kind. And somebody will say, well, that's what you get

for being in the military, or that's what you get for X, Y, Z, you know, maybe you shouldn't dress like that

and you wouldn't get raped.

You'll see people like that. If you take your problems to social media,

you're gonna get disappointed, so don't do that.

Get real help from somebody you can trust, a professional counselor, a physician,

a family member, a friend, somebody, a support group, somebody will help you, but be wise with who you choose.

If you're a veteran, there's all kinds of resources available to you, you just have to be willing to ask.

For me, prayer and meditation, too, really helps. We're always talking about changing your mind

so you can change your life, and the way you change your mind is meditate and pray.

Change how you think. Take control of your inner narrative,

because your inner narrator is not very reliable

when you've been through trauma.

It will tell you things like, I'm not safe, nobody understands me, this is gonna happen to me again,

it's my fault that this happened to me.

Those kinds of things are false. They are a false narrative, and they're not true,

and you've gotta take control of that internal narrative that you hear in your head, and you get to that place

by prayer and meditation, I'm telling you it works.

Avoid surrogates, don't use drugs or alcohol to cover up what you're feeling,

you need to deal with what you're feeling.

So get some help.

Also, the opposite of drugs and alcohol, so you're using drugs and alcohol to change your brain

and numb it and make you not feel certain things, but then those things are worse the next day.

So you're paying a tax tomorrow for something you did last night,

And instead, you should do things that actually improve your brain chemistry.

Sleep better, eat more, get exercise. This is self-brain surgery.

The things that will improve your neurochemical environment so that you will be better able

to handle that inner narrator.

Don't let your thinking control you, friend.

Control it yourself. Instead, you can, and you can improve your brain chemistry,

but if you feel out of control, you need to go get help from a doctor or a therapist.

Do not be one of those 22 people a day.

Before you do that, if you're thinking about that sort of thing, you need some help.

And if you can't find anybody, if you can't figure it out, send me an email, lee at drleewarren.com.

I will help you if I can. We will find you some resources in your area.

We'll point you to somebody. We'll pray with you.

Don't feel like you're alone because you are not. If there's literally nobody in your world

that you can get help from, reach out to me, lee at drleewarren.com.

I'll try to help you, okay? You're not alone.

Do not give up. We need you.

Don't ignore it. Don't place your frustrations on surrogate enemies who don't deserve it.

Don't lose your wife or your family because you're too proud or too afraid

to tell somebody what's really going on

or because you're not willing to look under that rock.

The answer, my friend, Joseph Campbell said, the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

That's why every great story ever told has some moment where the hero has to go deal

with something hard that they don't wanna go deal with before they can really solve their real problem.

That's why Luke has to go into the cave with Yoda and find Darth Vader in there and deal with him

before he can go defeat him in real life. You need to look under that rock.

You need to go into that cave because that's where the treasure is

that you're gonna be able to start to heal

or at least be able to believe that you can heal, which is how you grab onto hope.

I'm telling you, after my son died, I didn't believe I would be okay again.

But somehow Lisa and I were able to find this idea that it was going to be possible to feel okay again.

And that was enough. It was a little bit of light that gave us hope,

and hope is what you need, because hopelessness is deadlier than anything else.

Hope is what you need.

The life that you seek starts by looking under the rock, by going into the cave and dealing with the problem

instead of pushing it away, covering it up.

And finally, tell your story. John, you did a good thing by reaching out to me.

Talking about your problem, telling your story, letting people hear it and write about it,

share it with other vets, share it with people who have been through something similar to your story.

The more you bring it into the light, the more you can heal.

That is a principle that always helps. Bring it into the light, let it dry out,

let it become something known, and then you don't have to fear it anymore

and you can learn how to fix it.

Look, I know this isn't a comprehensive review of PTSD. I'm not qualified to do that because I still live with it every day,

I'm just sharing what my friend asked me to share with him, and I wanted to share with you, too

So there it is look you can't change your life until you change your mind,

But if you've been through major trauma you can start to believe that it is,

Impossible to be okay again, and that will be devastating for you if you start to believe that it's impossible to be okay again

you're going to end up as a statistic.

One of the statistics of divorced, alcoholic, suicide, those terrible things happen if you give up hope.

If you believe it's impossible to be okay again, it will turn out to be impossible for you.

So I'm here to tell you, my friend, listen to me on this early morning on a Tuesday in September.

Hear me say, it is possible. It is actually possible for you to feel okay again.

It is, it's okay, it's possible for you to heal. But you have to want it enough to work for it,

to look into the cave, to go through the hard things of dealing with it, to admitting that you have a problem,

that you can't do it alone.

You need community, you need friends, you need faith, you need family, and you can have them.

They are available to you.

You have something unique to offer this world, and we need you.

So decide today that the trauma isn't going to define you anymore, that whatever it took

away from you yesterday, it can no longer take away from you tomorrow.

It is not going to take your marriage, it is not going to take your kids, it's not going

to take your liver or your mental health anymore.

You are going to draw a line in the sand and you're going to deploy whatever resources

are necessary to fight that war and deal with it and get home from it and be okay again.

You're going to change it.

You're going to change your mind about it and that will change your life.

Look, this is self-brain surgery. It's the whole reason that I'm talking into this microphone

in a dark room in Nebraska right now is because you need this self-brain surgery

to change your mind and change your life. I needed it, that's why I started this.

PTSD is a real thing, and if you're struggling with it, you got to fix it.

Look, this is biblical. It's good neuroscience, it's good self-care.

You have to unpack those bags.

All that stuff you brought home from the war, whatever war it was that you faced,

whatever it was that you went through or are going through that is causing this traumatic situation in your mind,

in your heart, in your life, you need to unpack it.

You need to name it so you can know it, so you can fix it.

And my friend, you need to start today.