U.S. soldiers are battling stress on two fronts: at war and at home. Their coping strategies might help you on the home front as well
At lunch in a hotel in Philadelphia, a fast-talking, slightly rattled, 38-year-old master sergeant in camouflage and combat boots is recalling another lunch a few years back, in Iraq. That meal took place at a forward operating base, and he'd been standing 20 feet away from where an Iraqi soldier triggered the detonator on a vest loaded with explosives. Shrapnel ripped through everything in its path, and the blast flung the sergeant back into tables and chairs. He came to, dazed but alive, amid a scene of blood and chaos. "I was saved by a coffee urn that had just been filled, between me and the bomber," he recalls. "Guys on either side of me were torn to pieces."
Twenty-two people died, some while he was performing CPR on them. He spent a month recuperating from a shrapnel wound and then returned to his unit. A few months later, a car bomber hit his armored vehicle; he spent the next 5 months in bed with a broken back. "It took a few years to get over the bad dreams," he says. "I was worried that if I told the army I had mental-health issues, I would lose my security clearance."
The sergeant ended up with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a jittery witness to the way the U.S. Army's own leadership says it has mishandled trauma in the past. Now he is in Philadelphia to help as the army tries to remake itself, at a training session focused on teaching soldiers how to cope with their emotions--on the field of combat and back at home.
The basic idea behind "resilience training" is that you can train your mind to become mentally and emotionally fit the same way you train your body to become physically fit. And as with marathon training, it has to happen before you really need it, or in military lingo, "left of the boom." Bad things may still happen, from broken relationships to rocket-propelled grenades. But with the right training, the program's proponents argue, you'll respond better in the moment. Instead of PTSD, they contend, you can come out the other side with "post-traumatic growth."
The initiative is being deployed on the fly, at a cost of $125 million over 5 years, in response to record rates of depression, domestic strife, and suicide in a military worn down by 9 years of warfare. Col. Darryl Williams, the 49-year-old artillery officer organizing the program, is frank about its practical benefits for army brass. When they're grilled by Congress about the mental fitness of combat forces, he says, "they will use this. This is the only thing they have left of the boom to inoculate soldiers."
Reaching everyone who needs that inoculation will be difficult. The U.S. Army is simply too big to quickly reach everyone who needs the training. Also, the military has always prided itself on physical, tactical, and technological training; emotions have generally been viewed as excess baggage. Thinking was mostly something officers did. Now the army wants soldiers not just to think, but also to think about how they think.
In a conference room at the hotel, Karen Reivich, Ph.D., a University of Pennsylvania psychologist in flared pants and patent-leather flats, is teaching soldiers how to thrive in a hostile world, both downrange in the war zone and back home at the dinner table. The soldiers in her audience have seen more than their share of bad stuff, including multiple deployments, suicide bombings, and friends maimed or killed at close range. Many of them are now drill sergeants, those kindly guys at boot camp who use the nostrils of terrified recruits as echo chambers. Reivich is just trying to convince them to do it all more thoughtfully.
She tells them a story about the night she flipped out over a coffee coaster. The audience members have families too, so if there's a disconnect between problems with coffee coasters and, say, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), that doesn't seem to faze them. It's 17 years ago, the morning after her future husband moved into her apartment. Thinking he's scoring points, he has gotten up first to make coffee. But as Reivich wanders into the living room, her bleary eyes pop halfway out of her head in horror: He has set his coffee cup down not on the coaster but beside it. Coasters are sacred for her, and he knows it. So how hard can it be to use one? She winds herself up into such a coaster-compulsive snit that she blows down the door and flies out into the street in a vortex of righteous indignation.
So, um, what just happened here? And why should the U.S. Army, fighting two wars with roughly 154,000 soldiers deployed, actually care? The offense was nothing to get crazy about, Reivich admits. A little vexed, maybe. But the story has become her favorite tool for teaching people how to listen to family members, fellow soldiers, and friends. We all have what she calls "icebergs"--deeply held beliefs that now and then cause us to react out of proportion to circumstances. The trick is to find out what lies beneath.
Reivich gives her soldier-students four techniques that can help reveal a person's iceberg. First, she says, ask open-ended questions that require more than yes/no answers. Second, use the word "what," not "why." ("'What' questions make you stop and think," she says. "'What' brings out facts and events.") Then repeat the answers verbatim. ("You want the other person to hear his or her own thoughts, not your rendition.") Finally, keep asking questions until you arrive at an iceberg that's big enough to explain the overreaction.
Reivich's iceberg, it turned out, was a belief that her future husband should know her quirks and accommodate them. It was about the relationship, not the coaster. Someone in the audience asks if her husband now uses coasters, 17 years on. "No," she says, beaming. "And neither do I."
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