Chapter 1: The War Before the War
Each of us fought in a war long before we joined the military or deployed.
The war of childhood survival.
This war gave our body its first training on how to handle stress.
For most of my childhood, my parents were so stressed with life—and their failing relationship—that when I caused trouble or struggled with something, they rarely asked how I was feeling. Instead, I was told what to do, reprimanded or punished, and life moved on.
I learned to bottle up my anger and hide my emotions. I got better at ignoring how I felt. I learned how to "behave" but not how to stay connected to myself when I was stressed out or trust my inner sense of what I needed.
Unfortunately, the way we learned to handle stress as kids became the unplanned foundation for how we handled it in the military.
I don’t care how awesome your parents were, no one leaves childhood without a few wounds. And if you’re like me, you might have gotten more than your fair share.
But we adapted. We overcame. We struggled forward—indomitable.
We were soldiers.
It was all behind us.
Except that it’s not.
Our nervous system is still shaped by those childhood experiences. The way we’re breathing right now—how much space in the room we feel comfortable taking up with our breath—is still shaped by what happened to us in those early years.
The posture our spine is taking.
The amount of tension we’re holding in our shoulders and face.
All these things—and more—are still following patterns (neurological wirings) laid down by how we learned to deal with stress in childhood. Those same pathways were used again when we were under the intense stress of military service.
The definition I use for stress is one I first heard from Dr. Dan Siegel:
Stress is the activation of the body in response to something significant happening.
Stress may come from a wanted event, like lifting weights, (“good stress”) or an unwanted event (“bad stress”), but either way, it’s a situation that demands more from us than normal.
In the military, we often found ourselves in high-stress situations where our survival depended entirely on others:
I remember nodding off for two or three seconds at a time while driving through Baghdad at 3 a.m. I was in a convoy of 200 vehicles on a non-stop trip down from Mosul. It didn’t matter how tired I was—I had to keep going. There was no one to take over and nowhere safe to pull over. The choice was between staying awake or risking certain death for myself, my sergeant, and my gunner up top. I was at the mercy of my chain of command for relief.
Similarly, as infants, we were at the mercy of our caregivers—parents, siblings, relatives, etc. We couldn’t feed, clean, or even move by ourselves. We couldn’t regulate our own stress levels. We came into this world wired to reach out to others when stressed because we aren’t born with the systems in place to manage life's challenges on our own.
A baby cannot fully self-soothe. If left alone too long, it will die.
This is important to recognize because some of the traumas we’ve held onto are exactly like that baby. These powerful emotions cannot self-soothe; they need some kind of outside help.
In other words, in the military we sometimes experienced overwhelming amounts of stress, fear, horror, anxiety, and other powerful emotions. And in those moments, we sometimes reached the limits of what we could handle alone.
When that happened, a part of us cried out—usually silently—for someone to bring support, relief, aid or care.
The degree to which we didn’t get that care is the degree to which that stress became traumatic.
To be clear, most stress is manageable with the right amount of internal and external support, either during or after the event.
However, if a stressful event happens and we don’t have the capacity to handle it—and their isn't enough external support—a stressor can become a traumatic stressor.
Trauma is not the event itself.
Trauma is the unprocessed stress that gets stuck inside us in the absence of the right kind of support.
That’s why, in the next chapters, we’ll look at ways to rewire how we handle stress, both on our own and with others.
It’s critical to get our internal and external support teams in place. Then, and only then, will we go back and face the events that overwhelmed us in the past.
We’re wired to deal with the challenges that come while protecting our community, with our community. Our species has thrived across this planet because of our ability to group up and tackle challenges too big for any one of us to handle alone.
When we're with the right team, we are stronger together.
Key takeaways:
- The way we react under stress is shaped by our earliest training.
- Our basic training in how to ask for support and calm ourselves came from our early caregivers.
- Trauma is not the event itself; trauma is the unprocessed stress that gets stuck inside us in the absence of the right kind of support.
I've found it helpful to ask myself:
"What were the foundations of how I learned to handle stress?"
- How did my parents or caregivers treat me when I was upset as a kid?
- How did that train me to deal with stress in the military?
Consider those last two questions again, more slowly this time.
Then, use the link below to move on to Chapter 2: Brought to the Center.
We're going to explore what it means to find the right team.
