Jason Kander - The Invisible Storm Of PTSD

Foreign.

Team. Welcome back to the Man Talk Show. I am Connor Beaton, and joining me today is a very special individual, somebody that I enjoyed the conversation with deeply. His name is Jason Kander. Jason is a former army captain who served in Afghanistan and was the first millennial ever elected to a statewide office. He was elected to the Missouri state legislature in 2008 and as a Missouri Secretary of State in 2012. When asked this is a quote by Dan Pfeiffer from Pod Save America. When we asked President Obama who he saw as the future of the Democratic Party, the first name that came out of his mouth was Jason Kander. So Jason has pretty substantial background in military and politics. He is the president of National Expansion at Veterans Community Project, which is a nonprofit organization, and host of Majority 54, a popular political podcast. Jason's first book, Outside the Wire, was a New York Times bestseller. He recently wrote a book called Invisible Soldier's Memoir of Politics and ptsd. What we are gonna be talking about today is largely about ptsd, what it looks like and feels like to have ptsd, and how one can start to address that part. So whether you or someone that you know has had ptsd, this is a very insightful podcast because Jason shares a little bit about his journey in therapy, actually dealing with his ptsd, what, you know, the impact was on his wife and his family. You know, how she dealt with that. So while this is maybe a little bit of a shorter podcast, I think it's only about 45, 50 minutes long. There is some really great insight into what it looked like to be outside the wire, which is outside the base, outside the protection of the military. Jason's work, you know, what he was doing, interacting with people in Afghanistan, which is very insightful. So without any further delay, please enjoy this conversation with Jason Kander. All right, Jason, welcome to the mantalk Show. How are you doing today?

I'm pretty good. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, yeah. It's a pleasure to have you here. It's an honor. I think it's going to be a great conversation that a lot of people are going to find value in. So before we get into it, or maybe this is just going to get us into it, tell us a story about a defining moment in your life that made you who you are today.

So I think I'll tell you about my first time calling the VA or my only time calling the Veterans Crisis Line, which was a moment where my life shifted dramatically. To give you context, up until that moment, I had done two things, really, in my life. I Had been a soldier and served in Afghanistan, and I had also been a politician. I had done a bunch of other stuff too, but those were the two things that I really was up until that point. So this is late September of 2018, at that point, was the prohibitive front runner for the race for mayor of my hometown, Kansas City. But a few months before that, I had been on the presidential campaign trail. So I. I had already been Secretary of State of Missouri, run for the US Senate, and I was one of a few dozen people in 2018 who were thinking they were running for president in 2020. And it was going pretty well. The whole presidential testing ground thing, spending a lot of time in Iowa and New Hampshire going well. From a campaign perspective, I was not going well because I had, at that point, unknown to myself or unacknowledged to myself, had untreated, undiagnosed PTSD from my service in Afghanistan. And the other part of this backstory is that my work in Afghanistan was I was an intelligence officer, so I never fired my weapon my entire deployment. What I did do was go outside the wire nearly every day and go meet with people who were pretty unsavory and had questionable allegiances. And I was going out and getting information on people who were infiltrating the government from the Taliban or from Al Qaeda and then bringing that information back. But what that meant was, is I was out basically by myself. Often just me and a translator. Not defenseless, but not in a position to be able to successfully defend ourselves if it was a trap. So I was constantly on edge for the possibility of kidnapping or worse. But because I never fired my weapon, I was convinced that I was not a combat veteran. That's what I told myself. I thought combat was Black Hawk down or Band of Brothers, and that was it. If it wasn't that, it didn't count. And so I had spent a lot of time, I had spent over a decade telling myself, look, you can't have ptsd. There's just something wrong with you. That's why you have these violent nightmares and why you feel like you're in danger all the time and you can't sleep and all this sort of stuff. And then eventual depression and self loathing and shame and guilt and anger. But I was like, that's just me. And I was kind of keeping it to myself. My wife and I were the only ones who are new. So to get to your question, I had decided that I was too exhausted. Things weren't going well enough for me mentally for me to go through with running for president. And I had decided, you know, I'm going to go. I'm going to run for mayor of my hometown. That's going to make me feel great when I make a difference in my hometown. My kids are 6th generation Kansas City ins. I love my hometown. So that was the story I was telling myself. I also promised myself I'd go to the VA while I ran for mayor. Well, I didn't keep that promise. I didn't go to the va. I did start running for mayor. It was going great. We were going to win. I felt horrible the whole time, was increasingly thinking about ending my life, despite the fact that from the outside things looked great, right? Campaign was going great. And then one night I just run out of ideas. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to call the veterans crisis line and see if they know what I'm supposed to do. But I was real sheepish about it. I felt like they're probably going to tell me, keep this line clear for people who really deserve to call this line. And I called and I talked to the woman on the other end of the phone. And then one of the first questions she asked me was, have you had suicidal thoughts? And I had never acknowledged it to anybody other than my wife. So I said yes. And then I just got really emotional. And then she asked me a few more questions about my service and that kind of thing, about my symptoms. And I realized, and this was to your question about a moment that defined or at least redirected my life. I realized that from the tone of her voice, that I didn't sound any different from any other veteran that she had talked to in that job. And I had been telling myself this fiction for a long time that I wasn't the same as other people and that I couldn't have ptsd. And I realized right then I did. So I went and I actually googled ptsd. And I had read it many times, read the definition to try and convince myself that it couldn't be me. But this was the first time I read it with an open mind. And it was like somebody had written a paragraph about me. And I remember saying a couple of things that night to my wife. I remember saying, it's been almost 11 years and I'm just now realizing that I got hurt over there and I didn't know it. And then the second thing I said a little while later is, I don't want to do this anymore. And it was within like 48 hours that I had walked into the VA ended up in the emergency hold for suicide Watch. And then soon after that, thanks to an organization where I now work, Veterans Community Project. Thanks to them helping me get my paperwork moving at the va, I started weekly therapy not very long after that. And it's made a huge difference in my life, completely changed my life, saved my life.

I appreciate you sharing that story. And it's interesting because I think that a lot of the men that I've spoken with who have served in some capacity, whether it's in the military or SEALs or whatever it is, it's interesting how often, and even just outside of the military, you know, just how often we as men can go through a really traumatic experience or an experience that's just larger than what our mind and our bodies know how to make sense of, especially if we're kids. And we can downplay that. Right. It's like, well, there must be something just wrong with me. I think that's what stood out to me about what you're saying is the amount of men that I've worked with who had childhood trauma, you know, sexual abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse, and the maladaptive responses that come along with that are often coded as, there's just something wrong with me. It couldn't have been the circumstance, it couldn't have been the environment. It couldn't have been what happened to me. There's just something wrong with me. So I appreciate you sharing that.

Yeah. And.

I think for the military, I think it's even more pronounced because. Well, I wouldn't say it's more pronounced because what I don't want to do is have anybody hear this and go, oh, I didn't serve in the military, so what the hell is my excuse? I try really hard not to gatekeep trauma because I kept my own trauma for over a decade, and it kept me from going to get help. And I think there's an element of this in our society, especially for men, regardless. But in the military, there's this necessary form of brainwashing. And I say necessary because I don't knock the military for this. But from the day I can just speak for the army, but from the day you show up in the army, there's a very clear message that's gotten across to you both explicitly and in the air of everything, which is, somebody has it worse. This is not that big of a deal. Somebody has it worse. At first, you're in initial training, so you're just tired. You haven't slept in days. You're hungry as hell. Everything Hurts, you're dirty, you haven't showered. And they're just like, this is nothing. This is nothing. And so you learn really early, this is nothing. And so then for me, when I went downrange to Afghanistan, I was like, there were two other guys on my camp who were doing similar jobs to me. And I was like, well, Todd and Kevin are doing this. It's not that big of a deal. And I was like, and I haven't been blown up. I had friends that I had gone through training with, one who, by the time I was in Afghanistan, he'd already been shot by a sniper in Iraq. So in my mind, this is no big deal. Now, it wasn't until years later, after I had already gone to therapy, that I realized, well, and not to spoil part of the book, but Kevin had taken his life when he came home. And then I reconnected with Todd, and Todd told me, yeah, man, after we left, they completely changed the way that they did the job, because what we did was insane. And turned out he was having problems. And then not long after that, Todd attempted suicide. But I didn't know any of that then. All I knew was, what I'm doing is no big deal. And I think that. That, you know, when I say that, I realize now that a lot of people be like, oh, well, God, I didn't go through anything like that. You know what? It doesn't matter. Like, your brain doesn't know what my brain went through, and so it doesn't care. And my brain didn't know what my buddy Steven had gone through, even though intellectually I talked to Steven about it. But Steven had been in firefights in Fallujah. And so in my mind for years, I was like, I'm not going to go get treatment for ptsd. That's like stealing valor from Steven when what he went through was worse. And the truth is that the way they get us to do these really hard jobs is. And this is why I don't knock the military for it. They have to convince you that what you're doing is no big deal. Otherwise, I'm not going back into a room with somebody who might want to kill me. When I did it the day before, and it was scary, but I did it. And I'm like, I ain't doing it again. But I did it because I'm like, it's normal. It's not a big deal. That's all fine. That's how you fight wars. The problem is, is that nobody ever sits you down when you leave and is like, okay, actually, that was some crazy shit. And, like, that's not normal. And it's going to be completely normal if you are seriously affected by it. And I just meet people all the time who are like, oh, I didn't serve in the military. That's how they discount their trauma. Or, you know, I had a bad divorce. But, like, it's not like I went to Afghanistan and I'm always like, hey, man, whatever it is that happened with you, it. Trauma is trauma. Like, what's the point? And I spent 10 years trying to rank my trauma out of existence. Huge waste of my time. I could have gotten treatment, you know, early on in that period and been who I needed to be, but instead, I spent all that time trying to rank it out of existence, and it just doesn't work.

Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that clarification and distinction just into play. I'm curious. I just want to step into the moment of being outside the wire. Not that any specifics need to be shared, because I know that that's not necessarily possible. But I'm curious if you can give some insight into what's that like? What was that like for you when you look back at it and then are there certain skills that you found that you developed there that have helped you in your marriage, in life, and in politics, in the real world? Outside of that?

Yeah, it's a really interesting way to ask the question. So as far as skills that have been helpful, first, let me get to what it's like going outside the wire in Afghanistan. At first, it is very frightening. It's very frightening the whole time. But you don't really. After a while, you're like, it's just there. Yeah, yeah, it's scary, but it's really just like, it's your job. After a while, it's what you do. It's amazing what you can get used to. Right? Especially when everybody around you is doing it. Everybody around you is also in Afghanistan. So it's not. Not like it doesn't feel that unique after a while. First few times, I was more afraid that I was going to puke than I was going to get killed because I was so scared. Then it becomes like, oh, God, I hope I don't puke, because I'm just going to get known as the guy who puked from fear. I don't want that. And so the social fear, almost, it takes precedence. But then after the first few times, you're like, well, this is what I do. I mean, I did it yesterday. I'm going to do it today. It just becomes kind of normal. But the way that I did it, I can't speak for everybody, but I think this is probably pretty common, is you got to get yourself in a place that's not actually natural, which is you got to be prepared to take another human life. And for me, that was a low level of simmering anger. I wasn't consciously aware that I was making myself angry, but it was like that was the emotion that I accessed to be in that mental place. So every time you roll out of the gate, that's sort of what you're doing. You're coming to a place of full utilization. And then for me, I'm sitting in meetings with people who sometimes I know, like, okay, they're sitting with me, but I know that they're also sitting with the Taliban on a regular basis. And sometimes, I don't know, but you're fully utilized. You're hyper aware. You know where the exits are, you're trying to face them if you can. You have contingency plans in your mind. All right? If somebody who comes through that door, that's not supposed to. This is what I'm going to do. If this guy does this, shoot him, whatever. Never had to do it, but always aware of it, always prepared for it. And then the way I would compare that. So here I'll do the difficult part first, where it's not helpful in the rest of your life, and then I'll talk about the ways in which it is. The way it's not helpful is I like to use like an analogy like to golf. I'm not a big golfer, but I've played golf. If you're a good golfer on a full course, you might use nine clubs during a round of golf, right? And that's kind of like life, you know, you've got nuanced emotions. It's not just sad, angry, mad, bored, right? It's like, you know, you got empathy, right? You got embarrassment. You have, you have things like that, that you, you feel. And that's, you know, like playing around a golf. You go to Afghanistan, it's more like you're on the par threes, which is to say you're probably not going to need your driver. You know, you're going to use like a seven iron, a pitching wedge and a putter. Maybe if there's like a long par three, maybe you're going to use your, your three wood and that's it. So you got anger, that low level of simmering anger. You got whatever you would call it when it's slap happy, just gallows humor. You're just sitting around with your friends and you're laughing because what else are you going to do? You're bored and sometimes you're homesick. You don't necessarily use any of the other clubs because you feel like the other clubs might get you killed. If you're using empathy and nuance, which sometimes you need, but if you're using it a lot, well, then you may not be watching the door and somebody may throw a bag over your head and pull you out of that meeting and take you to an appointment with a beheading video on YouTube. So my brain learned to be on the par threes and I came home and now I'm on a full course and I'm supposed to access the rest of my bag. But I haven't swung those clubs in a long time. But to get. This doesn't work very well in the analogy. But it's not just like I haven't swung those clubs in a long time. It's also like my brain feels like if I swing those clubs I might get killed. And I have to convince my brain that I'm no longer on the par threes. But I couldn't. So that was the skill that I lost, was the ability to access all those other emotions without feeling like it was making me more vulnerable and potentially going to get me killed. Even though I intellectually understood I wasn't in Afghanistan. Now, what it did for me that was useful is I had developed an ability to have a level of calm under enormous pressure that most people don't access unless they go overseas and do that kind of work or just go overseas as a soldier. So as a politician, when I was in meetings that were very high stakes, whereas other people would probably get really nervous and really dislike that situation or when I was performing in a way where it was a very big moment and I needed to really nail a speech, whereas other people might be overwhelmed by the adrenaline I craved the adrenaline. That was the only time I felt present. So, like, I never felt better than when it was the biggest possible moment because I was just searching for that level of adrenaline high. I don't think it made me a better father and a better husband really, at all. But therapy did, because therapy allowed me to access those clubs again.

Yeah, I love the analogy and I appreciate you filling in what it did that wasn't maybe helpful. Sharing the maladaptive side of things and. And the impact that was going to be my follow up. So you Answered all of it. So I think you did a good job of describing what those types of circumstances can leave you with. But I'm curious, for people that haven't experienced PTSD in any real form or maybe haven't necessarily been around it as somebody that's gone through that, how would you describe it to somebody that really has no context to it?

Well, PTSD is an injury. It's an injury to your brain based on memories. So the reason I describe as an injury is because like any other injury, you treat it and then you manage it. But I didn't know that. I thought what a lot of people think, which is that PTSD is a terminal diagnosis, because that's what we're shown. I mean, in movies and tv, it's all PTSD porn, it's all voyeurism. It's usually a combat vet going through a situation where they are careening downhill, right? They're using drugs and beating their wife. It's usually a man. So they're beating their wife and they're robbing a bank. There's no fewer than four or five different movies about combat vets with PTSD robbing banks.

It's true.

But you know what they don't make movies about and what they almost never show on TV or in film, even though it's much more common. It's post traumatic growth.

There's just people, whether they're vets or not, walking all around us, like the aliens and Men in Black. They're just everywhere. And they are people who have been through therapy and dealt with their stuff and, you know, yeah, they still got ptsd, but, like, they got PTSD the way I still have a knee injury, which is that I had knee surgery 20 years ago. I ice my knee and I run and I maybe pop a couple Advils sometimes. And, like, I still run pretty fast. It's not like I don't have a bad knee, but there's nothing I can't do on my bad knee. I just know what I gotta do to take care of my knee. Well, that's what PTSD actually is when you treat it. That's what post traumatic growth is actually like. So what is ptsd? It's an injury, and it's an injury like any other. But we have sent a message to the world that a diagnosis of PTSD is a terminal diagnosis, that it will either end your life or, best case scenario, it will end your career. And that's just not true. What does it feel like when it's untreated? I can just tell you what it felt like for me. Sometimes it felt like my shirt was too tight. Like, you know, almost like just. It was like this ever present stress and tension that I couldn't seem to rid myself of unless I was fully present in a moment. And the only way I was fully present in a moment was when I was performing, like doing a big media interview or giving a speech, that kind of thing. And after a while that didn't do it either, you know, So I just used what was in front of me. I had a political career in front of me and I used that as my coping mechanism, as my self medication. It doesn't make me more virtuous than somebody else who used heroin instead. It's just what I had in front of me was this. So that's what I used. If I hadn't, maybe it would have been something else. And it also just kind of felt like this, like something right behind. You know, like when. When there's something right behind you, but it's in your blind spot and you can't quite see it, but you can feel it. Well, it's like that. But imagine that you felt like if you can't see it, it might kill you. In the. In my book An Invisible Storm, I described it as it being like that thing where, you know, you have four or five things that you're supposed to do that day but you haven't written it down and you're trying to go through the day and remember what all five things are. It's like that, except you feel like if you don't remember all five, you'll die. So that's what it felt like to me.

Yeah, I actually pulled one of the sections, I think this was from your book. But you said to me it felt like a constant threat right behind my shoulders in a blind spot I often couldn't see, no matter how hard I tried. Like it was always there, either terrorizing me or about to terrorize me. And I had no choice but to pull all my energy into preventing danger to myself and my family. And that was such an accurate description. It's so interesting because a lot of men will describe PTSD in different ways, but it was just so interesting to hear your description because I think it's something tangible that a lot of people can then grasp. A lot of the men that I've encountered over the years, PTSD becomes this other person in the marriage, another entity. Whenever I've worked with people that have any kind of addiction, it's like, well, there's a kind of affair that's happening, Right. And the affair is the addiction. So I'm curious if you can just speak a little bit to. In whatever way that you want, how the PTSD showed up within your relationship, within your ability to parent, even.

Yeah, no, it's a great question. In my case, it should have been two ways. One, it drove a wedge between me and the people I was closest to, including my wife, because I felt so isolated, because I felt like people didn't understand what I was going through, but also, I didn't understand what I was going through. And so over the course of time, the only thing that was quieting the storm in my mind was my work and my professional pursuits. So I just put everything I had into that, and I spared nothing for my personal life. And so that drove a greater wedge between my wife and myself. But then the other thing was my wife ended up with secondary PTSD from living with me, which is I'm a real treat, but she ended up with it because she's laying next to me in the middle of the night when I'm having night terrors, and then I wake up and I tell her what was happening in my mind, and then I'm convinced that we're in danger. So I'm telling her, you can't answer the door without me there. Meanwhile, I'm Secretary of State of Missouri, so I always have things to point to that were sort of quasi evidence to back up these feelings I had. They weren't real evidence, but they were to me. And, like, in the sense that, like, there were some threats against us as a public official, but it wasn't enough to justify the level of vigilance that I had. But so I ended up bestowing this gift upon my wife, which is secondary post traumatic stress disorder. And so it was almost like there were two other people in the house, my PTSD and hers. And so in therapy, my therapist, Nick, referred to PTSD as the monster. And it was important, he told me in the first session. He didn't say, we're going to slay the monster or we're going to kill the monster, or even that we're going to conquer or defeat the monster. He just said, we're going to tame the monster. We're going to get to a point where it lives in your house by your rules. And that's what's changed. And that's why I feel like I'm a good father and I'm a good husband, I'm a good little league coach, and I'M better at my job and all those things because, yeah, I got ptsd, but I've tamed it. It lives in my house by my rules.

I appreciate you sharing that. And I think what was interesting about the book is there's parts of it where your wife actually talks about the impacts that it had on her and some of the sacrifices and challenges that military families go through from her perspective. And I'm curious, what was it like for you to hear her side as you're going through this and you start to hear, you know, her perspective and some of the challenges that she faced? How did you start to support her with some of that as both of you navigated through this?

Well, it was really interesting. Even before we were writing the book, we were going through therapy at the same time. So she'd go to her therapist, I'd go to mine, sometimes on the same day. And so we'd come home and it was a lot like when we were in law school together, actually. We would compare notes for what we had learned. And so we were learning together, which was exciting. And I mean exciting because it was like, oh, like a mystery unraveling in front of us. Like, oh, that's why we're like that. That's why that happens. And we can take that, we can use that information when we can put that into practice. And then the book, it was interesting because, as you know, there's a passage from her in the first person in every chapter, which there's a few reasons for that. One of which is I'm not the only best selling author in the family. My wife's a bestselling author too. Why not also have her write in the book to make the book that much better? And her passages are my favorite part of the book because I worked very hard to have. As the story goes along in the book, I didn't avail myself of the language I learned later in therapy. I made sure that I, as the narrator, am relating to you the experience using only the terms and the language I would have had available to me at that time in the story. So that you as the reader are going through it with me and you're experiencing it from my perspective as I'm experiencing it. But that also is limiting because if I don't have language like hypervigilance available to me, and I'm explaining it as the world was really dangerous, I was convinced that people were coming to kidnap my son. Well, if that's all you get, you're like, what is this guy's deal? So it's really helpful to have my wife to be explaining what she was seeing in me so that you can get a more rounded view of what was actually happening in the moment, to have that other narrator. And then finally, for the purpose of just as you said, making people aware of secondary post traumatic stress, which we were not aware of until I started therapy. So getting to read my wife's portions, I mean, that's why they're my favorite part of the book. They're also some of the funnier parts of the book. And there's plenty of funny parts in the book, thankfully, because otherwise it's a pretty heavy subject. People might not read it, but some of her stuff and her perspective on she's a very funny person. And some of her perspectives on it are pretty funny. She refers to those portions as her rebuttals.

Yeah, the rebuttals.

Yeah.

Obviously the two of you went through this together and it sounds like both of you are much closer. Now, what would you say to the couples that are out there where one person is dealing with or has been dealing with PTSD in terms of how to navigate through that?

Yeah, it's a great question. I get it a lot.

One of the things I tell when I talk to people who were in my wife Diana's position, people who are like, I think my husband has ptsd, I think my wife has ptsd. What do I do about this? One of the first things I tell them is the first thing you have to do is recognize that you can't do this for them. You're not going to convince them just by yourself to go get help. You're not going to. And the more you tell them that they have a trauma, that they have a thing they have to deal with that they haven't acknowledged, the more that they might separate themselves from you and that they might feel defensive and attacked. So you have to be very careful about it. So what I just say is it's going to require a lot of listening and it's going to require a genuine curiosity on your part about what it is they're feeling and what it feels like, as opposed to trying to just, you know, it's easy. I mean, like if somebody's angry all the time or somebody's short tempered or they're not present with you, their mind is elsewhere. It's obviously very easy to just be frustrated with them about it and to try and get across to them that, hey, they're messed up, but that doesn't really work. It tends to usually entrench people, at least it did me even more. And I remember the moments when I felt the most connected to my wife and when I was probably the most receptive to things that she might have wanted me to do to try and improve, or when she seemed deeply curious and empathetic about what I was going through, which is super hard to do when, in many cases, not being treated very well by that person. So it's very hard to give that advice, like, hey, that person who's not treating you very well because they're hurting so much, you got to be genuinely curious and interested in what they're feeling. It's a hard thing for people to do, but that's the best advice I can give. Combined with recognize you can't do it for them, and you can't put that on yourself. And you're probably going to need your own therapy because what you're going through is pretty hard, too.

Would you say that part of it is that dealing with the individual that's going through PTSD is that they are somewhat unaware of the extent of the pain that they're experiencing?

Oh, for sure. And that's the thing. That's the trap people fall into, is they go, I'm going to convince them. And it's like, that doesn't really work. That's where I tended to get defensive. So now, one of the many things that my wife and I do, my wife likes to say that we're on our second marriage, which is great because we didn't marry different people. We're still in the same marriage, but she thinks of it as her second marriage. And so we have a lot of things that we do now for each other. And one of those things is we have a rule that if either of us says, I think maybe you should make an appointment with your therapist, neither of us are allowed to debate it. We're not allowed to be like, no, I don't need to, or no, either one of us can call it and just be like, time for a therapy appointment. And the other person can't argue and just has to make an appointment with their therapist. And. And it doesn't anymore. It's not super common, but it happens sometimes. And we try to be good about not having it be like, when things are really going off the rails, it's just like, hey, I feel like you've been off lately. And I feel like. I'll give you two examples. For me, I've been very involved in Afghan evacuation efforts over the last 10 months. I've been thankfully successful in getting a bunch of people out of the country that I knew, but it's still been super stressful and enormously stressful and traumatic. And my wife no longer was like, you need to make an appointment with Nick, my therapist at the va. So I did. And I've gone through a new round of trauma therapy to deal with this. My wife back in, I don't know, about six months ago, her closest friend, one of her closest friends, probably her closest friend, took her own life. It was her closest friend, but also her business partner. And so my wife, just the way I had sort of tried to rank my trauma out of existence by saying, well, you know, I didn't get blown up, I didn't get shot at. She was like, well, Sarah was my business partner. She didn't feel like she had the right to really, truly grieve this person because they talked four or five times a day, every day, and they built a business together. But, like, they didn't hang out socially that often. So, like, the story she was telling herself was, well, you know, was she my best friend? Was she? You know, so she was not allowing herself to accept the idea that she really needed to grieve this person because it was a person deeply close to her who she lost. And so that was a case where I was like, hey, you need to go see your therapist. And she couldn't argue. And she went through a new round of trauma therapy to deal with that. And we're both better for it. So that's where a rule like that comes into play.

Yeah, that's a great rule. I appreciate you sharing that. Can you give some insight? Because I can imagine that there's probably someone or a few people listening to this that have kind of had the knowledge that, you know, they've experienced something traumatic, maybe they have some PTSD symptoms. Can you give some insight into some of the trauma therapy that you went through? Just like, what does it look like? What are some of the things that you found useful and helpful? Just to kind of give people insight into the. Behind the curtain, I guess you could say.

Sure. Well, first thing I'd say is it's self serving, but that's a good reason for people to buy the book. And then I'll explain it here in a moment. So the book is Invisible Storm, A Soldier's Memoir of Politics and ptsd. I'll say two things about the book before I answer this question, which is, one, it's a New York Times bestseller, so lots of other people like it. Two, I'm unabashed in pushing the thing because 100% of my royalties go to Fight Veteran Suicide and Veteran Homelessness at Veterans Community Project. Now, with that said, the reason I say people should definitely buy the book if they're curious about this is the whole third act of the book, as you know, is me confronting my trauma and largely me doing it in therapy. I go so far as to include verbatim my records from therapy. So the notes that my therapist took. I went to the va, got a hold of my records and put them in the book along with my reflections on therapy sessions. And I did that because I wanted therapy to be more accessible to people. I don't want it to be intimidating. I want people to see how it works, why it works, what it feels like. And so they could see I wanted to let them into the therapy room with me. What I did is I did cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure therapy. There's a lot of different kinds of therapy. These are the two that worked for me, but that doesn't mean that they're supposed to work for everybody. If they hadn't worked for me, I'd have gone and done the next thing and I would have just kept going until I found what worked really well for me. But in my case, it was cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure therapy. CPT was kind of your more standard talk therapy, but for me, the important part of it was, you know, I would talk about what I was feeling and my emotions and that kind of thing. And my therapist, Nick, would then go to his whiteboard often and he would write down what I was saying on one side, and then on the other side, he would write down stuff about ptsd, things he was literally teaching me about my brain. And then he would draw lines to them. And it was, you know, my great uncle told me that getting that going to therapy was like getting a master's degree in yourself. And that is very much what CPT felt like. It was like Nick was like holding an interactive seminar with me about why my brain was doing what it was doing. Because as a buddy of mine said, knowing is half the battle. Once I knew that, I could understand what was real and what was the monster, what was ptsd? Trying to convince me of something. That's what cognitive processing therapy allowed me to do. That's just my non clinician way to explain it. Prolonged exposure therapy was harder. Prolonged exposure therapy was going right at my trauma. So I would go into a therapy session and I would get out my phone and I would record on the voice memo, Nick would have me record myself. As I would tell Nick, I would recount for about 45 minutes a memory, a traumatic memory from Afghanistan. And Nick would each time listen to it as if he had never heard it. So he'd ask me questions like a person who had never heard the story. And then my therapy sessions were weekly. So then in between the sessions, my homework was every day I was to put in my headphones, and I had to close my eyes. I wasn't allowed to multitask. And I had to listen to that 45 minutes of me retelling that memory. And what would happen is I would unlock additional parts of the memory because I'd been trying so hard not to think about this memory for years. And I would unlock other parts. I'd come in and I'd do it again the next week. And then there'd be other parts that I had forgotten about or that I had kind of blocked. Like, I would sweat, and my hands would ball up in fists. And, you know, I was re experiencing it. And then after a while, I remember we did this with several different memories. But after a while, I came to him and I was like, hey, I'm bored with this one. Can we do something else? And he was like, great. That's the point. Boredom is the goal. If you're bored with it and it's no longer, you know, you're not having that reaction anymore, then now it doesn't have that grip over you, and now you're taming it. You're taming this part of the monster. And so we would do it with other memories. The other piece that I did, which I think is part of prolonged exposure therapy, is something he called in vivo practice, or in vivo therapy, which I guess is like Latin for, like, in life. And that was a different kind of homework where I had these avoidance, which I only in therapy found out were avoidance techniques, Things I just didn't like doing. I didn't watch films or read books about war, about kidnapping, because that was what I was worried about overseas. It's not that I didn't enjoy them so much. I didn't do it because I thought that's what was giving me nightmares. I thought that's what was upsetting me. And sometimes it would upset me, but it was like junk food. I liked it. But what he taught me was, no, actually, your subconscious is playing whack a mole. You're consciously playing whack a mole with these memories all day and trying to avoid them and trying to stay busy and not think about them. And then you go to sleep at night, and your subconscious is like, we're dealing with this shit. And that's when you get the nightmares. So he got me watching those movies and reading that stuff, and that really helped with the underlying trauma of the nightmares. He also had me do things like sit in a restaurant for 45 minutes with my back facing the door, go on a walk and go 30 minutes without turning around, put in AirPods, and listen to something instead of being like, I got to be able to hear everything around me when I'm on a walk, things like that. And over time, I got better and better at doing those things. And so that was another part of the homework. So that's a pretty good explanation of the therapy, I think.

Yeah, it's pretty robust. I appreciate you sharing all that, and I'm sure that that gives some insight into people that are curious about it. And then, obviously, going into the book, I think will be really helpful because you do lay out a huge part of your process, which I think is very helpful for people. I know we don't have a ton of time left, but I do want to switch gears a little bit into the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And I know you've done a ton of work around that. I know that this is a huge priority for you. What do you try and say to average citizens that see this and don't really know the complexities of it? I know we're not going to do it justice, but what do you say to average people about why it's so important and why it's such a huge priority for you?

Well, it's a huge priority for me, personally, because they're my friends became initially a huge priority. And then we pulled off this wild, cowboyish operation and got a bunch of our people out and then realized, well, there's a bunch more people we might be able to get out who deserve to be out. So we kept doing it. So at this point, this little ragtag nonprofit that my military buddies and a few of my political buddies and I started called Afghan Rescue Project, has evacuated over 1800 Afghan allies out of the country, which is not what we intended to do when we started, and it's great that we did. So, yeah. As to the people who I don't know personally who we've gotten out, I will just tell you. To me, it's real simple. We spent 20 years in that country, and it really doesn't matter what you think about the war, the length of the war. Our country spent 20 years there, and guys like me spent our tours saying what our government was saying to those people, which is, if you have our back, we're going to have yours. Things go bad, we're going to get you out. And that's why every Afghan who worked with the coalition has saved every single piece of paper and every single little bit of proof about what they did. Every thing like, you know, that stuff you get in your job, whatever your job is, no matter who you are out there, that says like, oh, you did this training. Here's a little auto pinned copy of a certificate that you like. File right in the. In the circular file, goes right in trash. You don't care about it. Every one of those things that the Afghans got, they kept because they knew it was potentially a ticket out of hell one day. Every photocopy of their ID that allowed them to get onto the base or to the embassy or whatever. So when the evacuation started, that stuff was also evidence that could get them shot in the head by the Taliban. So they had to give it to their buddies in the American military or American diplomatic corps. So my phone is still full of these documents, the digital versions of all these people, and so that they could, you know, destroy it, because if it was found over there, they'd be in a lot of trouble. But they needed it to get out. Well, so we spent this 20 years telling them we'd have their back, and now, you know, there's a whole lot of them that are still there and that it seems like may never get out. And it's just wrong. It's a moral injury to all of us who told them that we would have their back if you don't allow us to have their back. And it's an obviously devastating breaking of the faith to them. It's been 20 years. These people have families and a lot of them have little girls. And it's wrong to think that they're little girls after what they did for our country should have to grow up under the yoke of Taliban rule. So I feel really strongly about it, and I've worked closely with this administration to get a lot of these people out. I think that a lot more need to come out. There are people who you run into in this process occasionally who will say things like, look, we got to draw the line somewhere. And I'm sort of like, no, I don't think we do. Because I think that the line ought to be anybody who helped us. We got to get them out. And so I feel like maybe that's the direction we're going. Now, and that would be good, but we have a long way to go. And I guess the other thing I would tell people is that over the next several years, no matter where you live in this country, there's a high chance you're going to meet an Afghan refugee, a person who got out of the country in the last year or so. And what I want people to know is that you're going to meet. These are extremely industrious people. They managed to get with our help, but really, they did it. We weren't there. They got themselves out of that place. They evaded the Taliban to get out. They're very industrious, and they will be, over the course of time in positions of management. They will be starting businesses, their kids will be extremely entrepreneurial. But for the next few years, they're going to be your Uber driver, your Lyft driver, they're going to be making your coffee at Starbucks. They're going to be janitors. They're going to be these things. And I guess what I want people to know is that they're all heroes, is that every one of those people you meet, no matter what the job is that they have at the moment you meet them, they did something truly heroic to get their family out of that country. They're worthy of your respect.

I appreciate that a lot. And that's us today. I feel like that would bridge us into a much larger conversation of war and politics. And I'm so wildly curious now to get your perspective on American politics right now. But we'll have to look, leave that maybe for a later conversation and when we have more time, but sure, yeah. Listen, Jason, thank you so much for coming on the show and being with me here today and for just sharing your story with our listeners. And for everyone that's out there, go and check out Invisible Storm, Jason's book, A Soldier's Memoir of Politics and ptsd. And, Jason, anywhere that you want to send people to follow along with your journey and the work that you're doing.

Oh, I really appreciate it. Thank you. And thank you for having me, Connor. I'm the president of National Expansion at Veterans Community Project. They can check out veteranscommunityprojectcp.org you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram. Jason Kander. And my podcast, which I do weekly, it's a political podcast, is called Majority 54. And you can buy the book wherever you buy books, but if you want to support independent bookstores, you can go to invisiblestormbook.com outstanding.

Thank you so much for everyone that's out there listening. If you know somebody that would enjoy this conversation, benefit from it. Make sure that you bent it forward, share it with them. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.

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