Ken Falke and Josh Goldberg: Episode 120

Transcript

[0:00:18] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Ken Falke and Josh Goldberg, the coauthors of Struggle Well. Thriving in the aftermath of trauma. Your struggle may come in different forms and be given one of many different names. Such as anxiety, depression, addiction or PTSD but no matter how much you or a loved one is struggling or what it’s called, the one thing that’s clear is that you aren’t living the life you desire. Ken and Josh believe there is hope by embracing the struggle rather than fighting it, you can stop surviving and start thriving. Ken and Josh know this because they trained combat veterans battling PTSD to understand and achieve post traumatic growth. They’ve helped thousands of people discover opportunities from times of struggle. In this episode, they provide actionable strategies for making peace with your past experiences. For living in the present and planning for a great future. This episode is full of invaluable wisdom on an incredibly important topic and it could very well save your life. Now, it’s time to learn how to struggle well.

[0:02:20] KF: When I was seven years old, my mom died, she had cancer at 29 years old and it took her life and you know, I think I kind of went on this journey from there like thinking “Wow, you know, I’m now with his dad who is a policeman who has got two sons,” and being a police man and a single dad is hard so I spent some time in Pittsburg with my grandparents trying to grow up and figure out how to become a man and you know, became rebellious and have all the things that happened there. I ended up becoming a very good athlete and a great hockey player and left high school to go play professional hockey. You know, kind of got kicked in the nuts again and that career didn’t work out for me so I enlisted in the navy and you know, really looking for something to be a part of, you know? A team, a mission, a purpose, all those types of things and you know, after a very successful navy career, I was a bomb disposal guy in the navy, I ended up back here at my home, state of Virginia just outside of Washington DC and all of a sudden, you know, we started getting bomb disposal guys on the battlefield losing limbs and getting killed in action and my wife and I started this small charity, we had made some money by then, we had a company that was making good money. I was in the counter terrorism business and we started this nonprofit, really to take care of these severely injured men and women and take care of their families while they were here in the major hospitals in DC. Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval Hospitals at the time. You know, one thing led to another, we started bringing these families away from the hospital and out to our home about an hour west of DC into the blue ridge mountains and families stayed here for days and then weeks and then overnight stays and hunting trips and all sorts of stuff and one thing led to another, we ended up donating 37 acres of our property to build this beautiful retreat and create the nation’s first dedicated facility to really try to heal these invisible wounds of war. That’s kind of what started this journey for us.

[0:04:21] Charlie Hoehn: That’s incredible. Josh, did you have a similar story when – or no?

[0:04:30] JG: I did and similar and yet very different. I like to think about, if you’ve seen me about six or seven years ago, and someone had looked at my life from the outside, they would have felt as though, it was idyllic, that I had achieved a level of success in this kind of a pinnacle of life. I was married and we had plenty of money, nice things, like two corner offices and worked for big companies and yet kind of inside, I was falling apart. And I went about to deconstruct my life and really try to understand why I felt this sense of kind of loneliness and disconnection, panic attacks, constant anxiety and worrying and to the point where I was suicidal. And so I looked to that and I was like, “I can’t continue to live this way, it’s not sustainable,” and I went through a lot of difficult changes of getting divorced, changing careers, switching friends and hobbies. Yet, I sort of walked away from everything in my life that had brought me value which is external stuff and I didn’t have anything inside to fill that void. And so I was in a place in early 2013 where I was in a real place of struggle. I happened to be working for a gentleman whose son passed away around the same age I was from drug and alcohol. He gave me a copy of the book, Man’s Search for Meaning and in the process of reading, it was the first time I actually had some clarity about life and about what I was experiencing, it gave me language for my experience. I left that reading with an inclination to try to do something for somebody else and to stop focusing on myself and my problems. Lo and behold, you know, a week later, I met some folks who were doing some work with veterans who wanted me to be helpful and I started down the path that for the first 35 years of my life had been nonexistent. Which was some kind of engagement with people who had a military or veteran experience. In the wake of that journey and in the part of that journey, I ran into several teachers that one in particular who is Dusty [inaudible] who runs our facility in Virginia and I ran into him, started a program that I had come to observe and he asked me, we talked for a while, and I had lived in New Zealand, he lives in Australia so we kind of bonded over that. He asked me what I was doing there and I said, “I’m here to help.” He said, you know, “You seem like that that’s true, that you’re genuine,” and I passed this kind of BS detector and then he looked at me and he said, “You’re going to do one thing before you help a single one of my brother’s sisters,” and I asked him what was that? He said, “You’re going to un-fuck yourself.” There’s this idea in the military that you don’t get to go around, right? You have to work your way up, you have to pay your dues and that’s what Dusty was kind of calling me on and so the truth about my story is two-fold. One is the combat veterans saved my life and gave me the opportunity to have the courage to look deeply within myself to figure out what it is that I wanted to do with my life and how I can maximize my own gifts. The second was the recognition that books and shared experiences can really alter your perspective and the trajectory of your life and that’s what drives our work and that’s what drove Ken and I to want to write this was the recognition that the messages that are being proliferated in our society are ones a victimhood and labels and diminishment and we don’t believe in any of that and our lives are testaments to that very fact. Not just the work we do with other, the work we’ve done on ourselves. Our testaments to the fact that the struggle is real and it’s beautiful and it’s meaningful and it’s useful.

[0:07:43] Charlie Hoehn: Wow, well, first off, I want to just double down on what you said about Victor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, it’s a phenomenal read and life changing one and I want to thank you both for writing this book, this is a topic that’s near and dear to me and it’s a super important message that doesn’t really get the – not attention it deserves but it doesn’t get the reverence, I think that it deserves in media. Josh, could you elaborate on what you said about those labels of victimhood and that sort of thing. Talk about that a bit more, elaborate on it.

[0:08:29] JG: General Mattis is currently the secretary of defense, he had a quote that he shared with a group of veterans and he said that, “Victimhood in America is exalted today.” It’s exalted. He said, “I firmly believe veterans should not join those ranks and I think in an effort to differentiate ourselves and to find a connection with something.” Far too many of us and I’ll put myself in that for a period of time. We associate with labels that often are inhibiting and diminishing labels like anxiety that I’m depressed, right? That I’m anxious, that I have PTSD or survivor’s guilt or moral injury or military sexual trauma, whatever it is, but it’s I’m a survivor or a victim and these labels are essentially serve as an excuse for the reason why we’re living a life that’s not as rich and fulfilled and purposeful and is alive as it could be. I understand why the mental health system uses labels in order to help with diagnostics and insurance codes and to help with treatment protocols. I also understand that those very labels inhibit someone’s capacity to grow. You know, at the bottom of my email, I have a quote from Goethe and it’s that if you treat people as they are, you’ll make them worse and if you treat them as the person, they ought to become, they’ll become that person. And so there’s this idea and then if you look past someone’s predicament and challenges and situation to a path of growth and hope and inspiration of possibility, you give someone the opportunity to see that too. And that’s where the labels end up putting a ceiling on people’s lives and enshrining a diminished version of ourselves and when I struggle, I was told I was depressed and I just looked at the lady and I said, how is that helpful? How does that help me that you’re labeling me, it may help you but it doesn’t help me.

[0:10:13] Charlie Hoehn: I love that quote by the way. Now, tell me, what is the big idea of struggle well, if you really want listeners to take the main concept away with them from this interview and remember it a year from today. What’s the big idea you want them to take?

[0:10:34] KF: Let me say just a couple kind of things before I tell you the real big idea I think, that is if you read the forward of our book, it’s written by retired navy captain Charlie Plum who spent six years almost to the day as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and the last several years and Charlie, as you can imagine being a prisoner of war can’t be fun and about 30% of the Vietnam era generation of veterans who came back from Vietnam had and were diagnosed with PTSD. Arguably, that same percentage is true for today’s Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, you know, somewhere between 20 and 30%, depending on which statistics you read. But at the end of the day, 30% seems to be the number and when I was talking to Charlie, one of the first times that we had met and he said something along the lines of, “Do you know that only 4% of prisoners of war returned from Vietnam with PTSD?” I was like, “Wow, how could that be?” You know what? Because I’m a combat veteran myself. I went through training, it’s what we call sears school in the military which is the escape and survival school if you ever do get caught or in a situation where you might get caught and I just can’t personally, and anybody I’ve talked to, battle buddies and guys, you know, I’ve been to war with – we’ve talked and just said, “What’s worse than getting caught and tortured on the battlefield. And not just for like a day or something before they kill you but for six years, then in those six years, how do you create, you know, hope in your life that when you return, something’s going to be better and you know, every bone in your body of some form or fashion gets broken or bruised, your ego’s you know, is gone, your desire and spirituality might be gone, I mean, how do you keep that stuff going? And what I tell everybody is that you know, PTSD is a big as a leadership issue as it is a mental health issue. How do you rationalize that? Is it, you’ve got an example of 591 men and women that’s spent anywhere form nine months to six years or 10 years in prison camps in Vietnam who came home and became better versions of themselves and not that struggle can be compared and that somebody might not be as strong as the person next to them but at the end of the day, when people can get through that and there’s definitely a strategy and a framework around what got them through that. It makes other things look a lot easier. And that’s kind of what we’re hoping is that the big idea in this book is that no matter who we are, prisoner of war to you know, a young person with massive depression and anxiety for varieties of reasons. No matter what place you are in the spectrum, it is – you’re going to live a life of struggles. And those struggles and how you respond to those struggles are choices, that you and only you have the ability to make. What we say is that, there’s really two questions, if you believe in this fork in the road of becoming a victim or becoming, you know, a survivor or a growth oriented person, that is a question. The difference in the question, basically of why in this deep search for meaning as Frankl will talk about is a question of why or why me? When you put me on the end of it, you can really go down as victimhood road. Right? “I got this black cloud over my head, poor me, pity me, I didn’t get the opportunities that he got, you know, she got.” That’s really what the story is, all of us are going to have a life that looks like some sort of a sign wave, a series of ups and down’s and how you get through those ups and down’s is very important to your growth opportunities and that’s what the book’s about is how to live that life of struggle and stay in this, what we call the livable band. The band that prevents you from living a crazy life of severe ups and downs.

[0:14:38] JG: Charlie, to add one thing and I think you know, the big idea and to take what Ken said, Charlie said, struggle is a terrible thing to waste. It will come to us, it will find us, will visit our lives and the question is, does it – do you allow it to diminish you or do you use it as fuel for growth and change? That’s the big idea and what we believe in what we set about to do what we do, got every day at our retreats in Arizona and Virginia is to help people find that path, to growth and strength and capability and possibility and that’s why we wrote the book. To basically set out that roadmap to get from places of deep struggle into profound strength and lifelong growth.

[0:15:14] Charlie Hoehn: I love this, I love it. It’s building your inner strength based on the struggles that you come through that come to you in life and it reminds me of kind of a seemingly trivial saying that I heard recently that stuck with me. Kind of the modern view on things, it’s like you hear a lot of people say follow your bliss and I heard somebody say follow your blisters. In other words, let the pain that happens to you be your guide and it’s not exactly what you guys are saying but this really resonates with me. How do we struggle well so that we can live well?

[0:15:58] JG: The first thing to understand and so we go back you know? In the 1980’s, there were two doctors, two psychologists at the university of North Carolina, Charlotte. Rich Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun and they were approaching tenure status and we’re trying to figure out what they wanted to study and they weren’t happy with what they were studying. What they looked each other one day and said, “You know what we should study? We should study how people get wise. Where does wisdom come from?” What Rich and Laurence concluded from conducting a series of interviews with lots of different people was that the folks who had the most wisdom were adults who had suffered severe injuries. Blinded, paralysis, losing limbs and adulthood and then it forced them to really reset their priorities and recreate a life for themselves that ended up becoming more meaningful and purposeful than they had ever had experienced. Rich and Laurence continued to study this and Rich went to a support group for bereaved parents one day reluctantly. He said, “I don’t want to go,” and they said, “You have to,” and they said, “And remember the admonition, you’re a clinician of a support group, keep your mouth shut, let them do the work.” What he heard from this parents was that although they would give anything including their own lives to have their child back but that wasn’t on the table. What they had created in the aftermath of the loss of their child were deep relationships with their other children with each other. Profound sense of strength and a sense of purpose and meaning and fulfillment that hadn’t been in their lives before. Certainly their lives were more serious and at the same time, that they were much more meaningful and much closer to what they perceive to be in the bigger sense why they were here. That post traumatic research we encountered Rich is we were trying to figure out why is it that certain people succeed after trauma and grow after trauma and others don’t. It is understanding that pathway and what we’ve done in our retreats is actually figure out how to operationalize 30 years of science. And that’s post traumatic growth is about – and that’s what the book is based on is that real world understanding, how do you take something out of the world of the theoretical and academic and put it in the world of the practical and applicable. The first thing to walk that road from struggle to strength is to recognize that struggle is valuable and it’s inevitable and the fact that you accept that it’s inevitable means that when it occurs, you don’t fall into that victim mindset but that you actually are able to say “Okay, this is happening. What am I meant to learn from this?” So much of Viktor Frankl to talk to much about to dear Dr. Frankl is this idea that life asks you questions constantly and your job is to figure out what the answers are, not to question the question. When you understand that struggle is valuable, you’ll start to look at it with that mindset. That’s part one, part two is also recognizing that struggle has an impact. It impacts our minds, our bodies, our heart, our spirit and it does cause us to react to life in certain ways and so it’s trying to be mindful and understanding the physiological and psychological impacts of it to almost allow you to look at that and observe yourself. Then the third is really understanding how to struggle well and live well. We believe as Ken said that life is a series of ups and downs and that the two things you need in life to say in a livable band, in a band that we would call thriving and being able to handle anything constructively would be wellness practices and areas of mind, body, finance and spirit and an incredible support network. Because you are the average of the three to five people you spend the most time. If you spend your time with people who also believes struggle’s valuable who have demonstrated ability to live principled lives that are inclined to serve others and that don’t it to attached to material things, you’re going to do well and if you’re surrounded by people who drink all the time who complain about the past, say they peaked in high school like Al Bundy, Married with Children. You’re going to end up in that place and so for us, it starts with education because Ken and I aren’t clinicians, we’re not mental health people, I think we’re getting close to being experts in life I would say and what we recognize is that the key to life is to allow people to be trained as opposed to being treated. Because treating implies that they’re down and treating implies that they’re down and they need someone to fix them. And training implies that we simply don’t have the skills yet that we need in order to handle situations. That’s really the first critical step of this journey and much of what the first chapter speaks to. And the second chapter as well. We get into understanding that and then putting him in to practice so looking at those wellness practices, assessing yourself and how you’re doing and as you move through the book and you start to move through the phases of post traumatic growth, you go from regulation which is preparing yourself to do some really hard things, to them looking back. And looking back at how you’ve been trained throughout your existence. Looking back at your childhood, looking back at your adulthood, looking back at different experiences you’ve had in your life. Things that have happened to you and things that you’ve done to other people because of those. Understanding those linkages and understanding that you aren’t who you think you are, you’re how you’ve been trained to be. Once you understand that you are not static and you’re not stuck then you have the ability to start to craft a new story. One that is purposeful, one that’s fulfilling and most importantly for me, one that’s authentic. One that speaks to your deepest needs and what you said which is this follow your bliss idea, follow your conscience, figure out what it is that you must do and go and do it and then the last part of that is we understand and recognize that service is a critical component of anyone’s life. You have to engage in service at levels commensurate with your wellness. You can’t go start a nonprofit if you’re struggling because you’re going to end up bringing that struggle into your nonprofit and into people’s lives. The last thing I’ll say is, the beautiful part about what Rich and Lawrence did is they created a process that democratized mental health and struggle because they found that the best person to help another human being through times of deep struggle is someone who has been there. We see that with a Sandy Hook parents deploying to sites of school shootings to serve as rather response teams to sit with parents and just be with them. What we know and what the Hillary Hilton teaches us is that struggling well is not the realm solely of mental health professionals, it’s the realm of those of us who have struggled and come out on the other side and are willing to go back down that mountain and help people climb it. We believe that climb is valuable.

[0:22:11] Charlie Hoehn: Wow, for anybody who just listened to that, rewind it and listen again because there was just dense with such value and I want to hit upon a few things that you said but first to that, last point is with the Sandy Hook parents going to support other parents and families that have been through mass shootings. Do you think that is an intuitive move on their part or are they being intentional about struggling well? In other words, are humans drawn to serve each other and serve themselves at the same time by struggling together? Or is this more, they have learned, this is how to struggle well? Am I making sense?

[0:22:59] KF: Yeah, I think Charlie is the latter. This is the whole purpose of this is that you know, as Josh said, you become the sum of your training, you know? From when you’re born until these tragedies hit, you know? You suffer through childhood experience, the average childhood experiences and you become the sum of all your training and if you don’t retrain yourself then you won’t be able to do this and this is what these parents do is they get around, they go through a grieving process, they realize that they have more to offer, right? That this isn’t the end of their life but maybe the beginning of a different life or a new life. They get this new purpose and passion and figure out how to go and actually, you know, make K with it, you know? Literally and how to help others and that’s, you know, when you look at the framework that the desk studied. The epitome of post traumatic growth is getting to that, this kind of constant to become an expert guide and be able to turn back around as Josh said on the mountain and help the next person up the mountain and that’s what happens I think in many of this cases.

[0:24:12] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. Josh, is something that you said that I loved was, life is asking you why or it’s giving you these questions that you're supposed to listen to and find answers to. Don’t question the question. It reminded me of something that Jung said which is, “That which you most need will be found where you least want to look.” And the temptation with struggle is it’s painful, right? We don’t want to address it and so we turn to victimization, right? To, “Why me?” Because it’s painful and it doesn’t seem fair but what it really seems like you guys are doing is shifting the lens in which we view struggle as something that serves and a part of our training to help us all become more powerful or empowered resilient human beings.

[0:25:52] JG: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely true and it is shifting that perspective and I think, you know, because it’s – people talk about getting bitter or getting better, right? These two different pathways and when everyone around you is getting bitter, it’s contagious, it’s toxic. What’s amazing about those Sandy Hook parents is that they did make a conscious choice to not allow themselves to be defined by this but to use it as fuel for something in our lives and our stories are pretty amazing and the coolest part of their stories that they go down, they don’t say much, they just sit with this parents because they know what that feels like and then they don’t feel the need to kind of tell people what to do. That is at the heart of this, then it gets my – I don’t want to say it’s a frustration, it’s a concern I have that we feed these narratives and these negative spirals that suggests that when something bad happens to you, you know, that’s kind of the end of it and it’s like no, that’s supposed to teach you something. That’s the only possible rational for why struggle exist is to help you learn and grow which are innate qualities of humans that we must grow, we must [inaudible]. I totally agree with that, having that in the coolest part is, people look at veterans of war far too often as sort of this broken humans. I don’t see that what we should be learning from them is about struggle at all, I think what we can learn from them is about strength and courage because they run to the sound of gunfire and it’s like, if you run to the struggle, if you endure it, if you are willing to take on that which you fear then really, nothing can knock you down. You live a fearless life without worrying about what other people think or about what you're doing, you just do what you must do and do the right thing.

[0:27:29] Charlie Hoehn: Learning that and not only courage and strength but camaraderie and service. You guys talk about this in your book, to serve yourself, you must serve others and I know we hit upon that, can we dive into that a bit more and what it means to serve and guide others?

[0:27:50] KF: Yeah, Charlie, I want to go back to one thing you said though because we’ve got this like really clear kind of taxonomy of what we say and do and trying to change the narrative a bit. You used two words that we try to stay clear of when we’re talking about human strength and struggling, those are empowerment and resilience. On the subject of empowerment, what we try to do is w make sure that you know, from a post traumatic growth perspective, at the individuals know that they’re in charge, right? That nobody can give you permission or needs to give you permission to be this empowering body, right? It’s like, I’m nobody different than you are, put my pants on the same way, right? You’re human beings, we’ve been kind of born with the same opportunities, in the greatest country in the world and you know, here we are kind of trying to tell people that you know, maybe because I have a little more money than you that I can empower you to do X and Y. We try not to do that but to really let people understand that life is about their choices not others. We get frustrated by that a lot and then because we see other non-profits that their mission is to empower people and it’s like, where did you get this power to empower people. Who are you, but thanks for your help, the other one is resilience, you know? And the literal term of resilience means to bounce back. You know, I always, I was an explosives guy in the military and we used to blow doors down and I used to tell guys that you know, you got to be careful where you stand when you’re blowing a door down because when that blast comes off that door, it hits the wall behind you and it hits you twice as hard as it did after it hit that hard. Because it’s kind of this what they call reflective blast and it’s the same concept as a superball, right? If you throw a superball against the wall, it comes back at you and it almost twice as fast as you threw it. What happens in life isn’t always about bouncing back, right? It’s like, I want to get better man, I want to take these struggles and kind of figure out how to thrive, maybe just bouncing back isn’t good enough so when we talk about this kind of humanistic approach to resilience, you know, it’s really about how do you handle adversity. How does that adversity, does it throw you off? Does it allow you to – are you in a place where you can remain balanced and present and you know, get through it and track it but really, it’s all about managing adversity in the face of this adversity and not bouncing back but better. That’s not the definition of resilience, resilience is literally about – kind of where you were and you know, you can think about wearing a spandex shirt or something, under shirt, you pull the shirt and it bounces back to where you let it go again and that’s kind of what resilient fabric is but when you talk about humans, it’s really about, how do you face adversity and how do you manage adversity as it hits you in the face. I think once you start to get this new taxonomy, and this whole concept that it’s about training, it’s not about therapy, it’s not about just somebody else healing you, how do you take control of your life, that’s the challenge that as you perfect that growth and the strategy. That’s where you get to this expert guide spot. And then it’s like, “Wow”, we used to have a saying in the military that you learn more when you teach others and I think that’s so true in even life. It’s not just about maybe how to rig an explosive charge or how to go scuba diving but how do you get through life and as part of that expert guide, there’s a couple of things that are really important. The first one is being a great listener and listening is hard, right? The next time you are talking to your best friend just watch his lips. He’s already coming up with a response for what you’re told. People, especially Americans don’t tend to listen very well. It’s like we’re jumping to conclusions in a conversation, we got a better way for that individual who’s asking us for help. So listening is one of the first things that great guides have to be able to do. And that listening helps you build your empathy because teaching people how to become empathetic is never easy. It’s not that you’re born with it. You become empathetic through your own struggles and if you’re not, you’re not learning from those struggles and empathy is going to be a very difficult thing to learn and the second thing is experience. You know when I was sitting in my computer last night writing up a table about how experience in our country doesn’t seem to play the valuable role that it once played. And people get to the high places of leadership in our nation where they don’t necessarily have the experience to back it up and when you’re a guide, if you’re giving advice and you don’t have the experience to back that up, it can be very dangerous. So, Josh mentioned earlier, we have four areas of wellness that we focus on, mind, body, spirit and financial. Financial wellness is very important for Americans. We have to have money to live in this country. And if you are having financial problems, you don’t want to go to your buddies who has been bankrupt seven times. Now there might be some value in understanding about bankruptcy that he could share with you but if you are trying to get on a budget, trying to learn things about how to get out of this situation, you want to go to somebody who’s got the skill. And the same thing with your body. If you want to learn fitness, you want to learn nutrition you just don’t go to a fat guy sitting on the side of the street smoking cigarettes and drinking Coke. I mean he’s not going to be able to give you any good fitness advice but he would if you ask him he probably would. So our point is that to become this expert guide, you really have to build your wisdom and experience or at least know who to lead your people to for that expert advice and then second is to really become a great listener.

[0:33:37] Charlie Hoehn: You guys are over delivering on the number of things, it’s hard to listen, ironically because there are so many good points that could be standalone conversations on their own but it’s just stacked. And I appreciate you actually calling me out on not using the words empowerment and resilience. I think it is important to be disciplined about word choice. So instead of saying empowerment, you have the choice to take control of your life. And instead of saying resilience, it’s more about handling your adversity and not just bouncing back but bouncing back better through training. Am I on point there?

[0:34:20] KF: Absolutely and I thank you for it.

[0:34:22] JG: And Charlie just on that idea of language, we had a writer. A guy whose father was a concentration camp survivor. Excuse me, he was in a concentration camp. I’m going to be careful with my language. And in one of the worst situations. They were building the V2 rockets that were hidden in London and in a cave and they killed a bunch of people and it was just bad and Jim had written a book about it. It’s a great book, it’s welled up has traumatic roads. And so Jim sat through a program with seven females and he looked at them at the end and he said, “I want to apologize. We used to refer to folks like you as trauma victims in the literature and we were really proud of ourselves because we shifted from that to trauma survivors,” and he said, “You were neither victims not survivors. You are the most incredible formidable and strongest people I have ever met in my life and that’s all you are to me are just strong people.” And I think that’s what we can lose sight of when people are struggling is their strength, is their capacity and at the beginning, you mentioned this idea of being able to help people add strength and what I tend to think is that these experiences and these struggles actually reveal it to us and that we’re all born with this birthright towards growth and towards struggling well and we lose sight of it because the narrative in our society is so dominant about wanting to be a victim that we forget. No, no, no if struggle was diminishing in a permanent sense literary our species would not have survived because each one of us goes through some stuff. And so that idea I think is what we’ve lost sight of. It’s like innately, we are capable of being able to walk through the fire and be stronger and better for it and I think it is just reminding people of our very nature is one of our incredible strength and the capacity not to survive. We’re not meant to survive, we’re meant to thrive. We’re meant to live great lives and that’s why we’re here and that’s the idea.

[0:36:10] Charlie Hoehn: I love this. This has such been phenomenal, a phenomenal interview. Sincerely. So thank you both for this. I know we’re coming up on time but I want to talk about your retreat. Tell me a little bit more about the retreat, where listeners can find some more information on it, who it’s right for, who it’s wrong for that. Sort of thing.

[0:36:33] KF: So the retreat is called Boulder Crest Retreat and we have two locations. One here in Bluemont, Virginia about an hour northwest of DC and then another one in Sonora, Arizona which is about 45 minutes south of Tucson and both are beautiful locations and five-star facilities, very high quality construction and beautiful healing place and we’re really excited that we host primarily combat veterans this year. In 2018 we have opened up our warrior path program which is our post-traumatic growth flagship program to first responders and we did that with the approval of our board last year. It was a big ask and we’re glad that to be able to do it because we know there is a lot of first responders and especially some of these really devastating places where we’ve had big issues in Vegas and Florida now, the school shootings where these first responders can come back through our program. And really what we are trying to do is solve the way mental health is done in this country for combat veterans and I had travelled all around the nation. I’ve been to almost every prestigious school that does psychiatry and psychology and I heard over and over again that what we are doing for combat veterans doesn’t work and they kept saying things like, “Well if doesn’t work why are we doing it?” You’d hear things like, “Well it’s all that we have. It’s all that’s approved. It’s the only thing that insurance reimburses us for.” And really our goal is to not take that approach and on the bomb disposal guy, if you do things that don’t work more than once the first time you might get lucky, the second time it’s going to get you and I think mental health, this whole concept of these invisible injuries is as lethal as a bomb and if you don’t attack it with meaning and purpose, you’re not going to bring it down. You know there’s 20 veterans a day commit suicide. Well the VA says 20, you know? We think it’s even higher. There’s a lot of deaths that are suicides that don’t get reported. There’s a lot of deaths that are suicides that get reported as things like traffic accidents. So not always do they get reported as suicides but the VA does publish the numbers as 20 but at the end of the day only one person on active duty on the military takes their life. So that is too many as well but I think getting to zero is probably difficult but at the end of the day, it’s damn sure that shouldn’t be 20 and something is happening between active duty and veteran status that nobody seems to have a grip on and listen, this has been going on now for 15 – well the war has been going on now for 16 years. It’s almost 17 years this year and the suicide problem has been on our face for 15 of those 17 years and it’s not 19. It’s not 16 this year. It’s still 20 and that tells me that we’re really not well.

[0:39:25] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah and just a quick point on that what’s frustrating is that they are still researching the problem, which is not bad in it of itself, but the primary solution as you said seems to be let’s get them on prescription because it’s what the system allows us to do and it doesn’t work.

[0:39:50] KF: When you do the same thing over and over again, it’s insanity right? It’s crazy, I sat on a suicide prevention round table this last past week and you know, no disrespect to anybody who’s listening but it’s the same people in the room. It’s the same solutions that have been regurgitated for the last 15 years and we did not go from 2017 to 18, we haven’t gone from 20 to 19 and that to me is a tragedy and it tells me that something is not working here.

[0:40:25] Charlie Hoehn: Right and it’s not just combat veterans, of course. This is one of the leading causes of death in the United States. It’s crazy to me how much attention, how much reverence and stuff like things like cancer get and suicide is this woo-woo like no and like you said, as lethal as a bomb because if one person commits suicide it affects their family, their friends, their entire community. And this is such a huge problem. So I love that you guys are doing this and I did not mean to cut you off again. Continue but i just wanted to say, this is a huge problem.

[0:40:59] KF: It is a huge problem. I think it’s 123 Americans a day take their own lives. 20 of those are veterans and I think one suicide affects somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 people. You know when you start looking at family, friends and relationships and especially now with social networks and large social friendships it’s a big problem and when you know people that have taken their own lives and you are suffering with depression and anxiety, your chance of getting to that place is increased. And if it happens in your family, your family members, chances are increased and I just think at the end of the day that if we don’t look at this in a completely different way which I think we are, you know taking post-traumatic stress disorder and turn it into a growth opportunity, if you don’t take it a completely different approach then I think you’d become part of the problem and not part of the solution and our goal really is to be a part of the solution. And to share what we’re learning with as many people as we can, the next generation mental health therapists, the progressive mental health therapists that are looking for new ways to doing business and really trying to share this success because what we’ve seen is we’re 12 months into an 18-month scientific study program evaluation on our Warrior Path Program and we are seeing symptom reduction that’s three times more effective than traditional mental health care. And we’re seeing growth like Rich Tedeschi, Dr. Tedeschi who again is the guy who coined this term, post-traumatic growth term 35 years ago, he says he’s never seen anything like it in his career. So we’re onto something and what we hope with podcasts like this and you know, help with guys like you Charlie who are doing these great podcasts is to really try to get this message out as wide as we can.

[0:42:42] Charlie Hoehn: Absolutely. I love that you’re doing it and of course, it’s a complex issue, numerous factors and I think a lot of this stuff is people lose their courage, their sense of purpose, their responsibilities and the fact that you are giving them the choice to take back control of their life so that they can, as you said, bounce back better through training is so impactful and important and I love that you’re doing it and I encourage you to film a lot of this stuff. So you can capture these transformations as they happen and I am happy to talk to you guys more about this just after the podcast or whatever because as I said, this is a subject near and dear to my heart and I really feel for the men in particular who struggle with these issues and don’t get the support that they absolutely need. So thank you both for writing the book, for doing the work that you do. Could you say one more time the name of the retreat?

[0:43:45] KF: Yeah it’s Boulder Crest Retreat and the website is bouldercrestretreat.org and that’s the website.

[0:43:53] Charlie Hoehn: Excellent. So give our listeners a challenge to wrap us up. What is the one thing that you want them to do from your book this week that will make a positive impact on their life?

[0:44:06] KF: I’m going to give you two things. One is remember that you become the average of the three to five people that you spend the most time with and if you’re spending time with toxic people, get them the hell out of your life and that’s not as easy as I just said it but it’s got to be in your future because you are hanging around with three to five drunks, you’re going to become a drunk. And the other one is to start taking some classes on self-regulation. Because our philosophy is if you said you can’t self-regulate, you self-medicate and that leads to some bigger problems and then anybody can help you with. The recidivism rate and alcohol and drug rehab is horrific. Once you get addicted to anything like that you’re going to have a hard time living a productive life. So those are the two things that we try to leave everybody with, figure out how to self-regulate, take some classes, exercise, yoga, meditation. Those types of things and really start to look hard at the people that you’re spending time with because that’s what’s influencing your behavior.

[0:45:06] Charlie Hoehn: Ken and Josh, this has been great. The book is Struggle Well, thank you so much.

[0:45:12] KF: Thanks Charlie.

[0:45:12] JG: Thank you Charlie.

[0:45:15] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Ken and Josh for being on the show. You can buy their book, Struggle Well, on amazon.com. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about book with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.