Preparing the mind for difficult situations

Lt Col Brian L. Slade started as an enlisted man in the US Army as a diesel mechanic. After he got his commission as an officer he then stated flying Apache helicopters. Shortly after a very long and arduous deployment he decided to transition into the Air Force in an attempt to save his marriage.

His first deployment was for twenty-three months and he had only been married for five months prior to that so for the first two and a half years of the marriage they were separated for two. The problem is often not the separation but when you come back together again and military personnel who are dealing with potential trauma in a very strong comrade type team often find it very difficult to go back to a routine husband, wife and children environment.

Brian’s ex-wife had also had a mental disorder borderline personality disorder so the relationship was really tumultuous. In some ways it was more traumatic than some of the things he was being asked to do in the military because he wasn't as prepared for the dynamics. The military prepares you for certain dynamics that you are going to experience. You are used to a certain regimentation and interaction that didn't work with the relationship.

Brian’s book is about trauma and the reason he wrote it was because when he was deployed as an Apache pilot there were crazy, traumatic, intense experiences that he was exposed to. He started asking why would he experience post-traumatic growth rather than the post-traumatic stress we always hear about. He looked at his peers and although they had the same stimulus they had different results. Brian felt he had grown from his experiences and that they increased his resilience and his ability to see things as opportunities rather than obstacles that would drag him down. Other guys on the alternative end of the spectrum were thinking about taking their own lives - that's a very big spectrum for the same stimulus

Brian’s book outlines seven principles. Things like growing a healthy perspective, how do you do that when you experience things that pull you into a myopic perspective but need to maintain that macro perspective?  How do you build a healthy support system and what does that look like. What are we talking about when we say we need to release hate? That's a big one that we don't really talk about. There are a couple of meanings to it. When you are at war, when you have to kill someone it makes it easier to de-humanise them and make them into something they aren’t. Harboring a hate for them is a coping mechanism but it’s not a healthy one.

As well as releasing the hate for the enemy you have to release the hate for yourself. As we start doing the things that the ugliness of war calls for we start painting ourselves as ugly to, that that's part of who we are. You need to remember that just because you’re there doing things other people wouldn't do it doesn’t make you an ugly person - it makes you a proxy for the people who aren’t suited to doing it or cant do it.

This is similar to a disassociation technique and it plays back to one of the other principals of defining and embracing your honorable mission. Brian’s honorable mission wasn't really to get Osama bin Laden, that was what got him on the plane but realised his honorable mission was to make sure that as many of his brothers and sisters in arms made it back. You are going to do ugly things at times to make sure that your honorable mission is accomplished,

How do we avoid festering, emotional wounds? If you're a banker and go to work and you have a transaction or something happens that's interesting you go home and talk about it. It’s so much harder to do when your job is blowing up twelve people but the fact still remains that your honorable mission is to make sure the ground guys make it home safely. It’s harder to talk about it but that’s how you avoid the festering emotional wound. You just talk about it in a matter of fact way.

Building resilience is never ending. With an honorable mission there’s a beginning and end. There are moments of high adrenaline and then lots of time doing mundane things. The mission allows you to compartmentalise things. There is the focal point that we are looking at and around that are lots of ugly things but when we pull the trigger we have just completed our honorable mission. We know there is lots of auxiliary stuff in there but that stays there because you’re in the ugliness because of your honorable mission. You don't have to take that home with you. Part of that is sharing it. You share it as matter of factly as you possibly can. You use humor because it makes it easier to share. Brian realised humor was his stepping-stone to talking about it seriously. In a way it’s doing the same thing with hate – you’re coping but it’s a positive emotion for coping not a negative one. It's a lily pad to being able to talk about it.

Brian also uses chair flying which is an aviation technique. He added the meditation and role playing pieces to the visualisation aspect. A lot of people will struggle with anxiety if they are visulising a very stressful event so you control the environment through meditation and create a safe space where you plant the things you want to grow and get strong. Breathing exercises help to get in the right headspace and then start to visulise an emergency procedure.

One exercise has a co-pilot and engine getting shot out. In a matter of seconds you need to react to the rotors going down. The co- pilot is screaming in the background and you automatically think that's the first thing to deal with but in fact its number three on the list. The rotor is most important. The flight controls are jammed so that’s the second action then the co-pilot but it all needs to happen in one or two seconds. You don’t get through that by thinking about it. In the leadership world they practice so they get it right, in the military they practice so they don't get it wrong. Things do go wrong but the risk reduction is there. The noisy drama is not always the first thing to do!

You can find out more about Brian at https://www.clearedhot.info/ or find his book Cleared Hot.

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