Chapter 1: The War Before the War
Each of us fought in a war long before we joined the military.
The war of childhood survival.
This war trained our body on how to handle stress.
My parents were so stressed with life and their failing relationship that when I struggled, they rarely asked how I felt. 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 good at ignoring how I felt. I learned how to ‘behave’, but not how to recognize what I needed when I was stressed out.
The way we learned to handle stress as kids became the foundation for how we handled it in the military.
No matter how good your parents were, no one leaves childhood without some wounds. And if you’re like me, you might have gotten more than your fair share.
But we adapted. We overcame. We pushed forward—unstoppable.
We were soldiers.
It was all behind us.
Except that it’s not.
Our nervous system is still shaped by those early experiences. The way we’re breathing right now—how much space we feel comfortable taking up in the room with our breath—reflects what happened to us as kids.
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 faced high-stress situations where our survival depended 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 dependent my chain of command for relief.
As infants, we were also fully dependent on caregivers: parents, siblings, relatives. 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 can’t fully self-soothe. 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 outside help.
In the military we sometimes faced overwhelming amounts of stress, fear, horror, anxiety, or other powerful emotions. In those moments, we 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.
Most stress is manageable—with the right support, whether during or after the event.
But if we're pushed past our limits without enough support, stress can become trauma.
Trauma isn't 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 explore how to rewire our stress response, both on our own and with others.
We need both our internal and external support in place—before we go back and face what overwhelmed us.
We’re wired to face challenges that arise while protecting our community with our community. Our species has thrived by coming together to face what no one can handle alone.
Key takeaways:
- The way we learned to handle stress as kids still lives in our adult bodies.
- Trauma isn’t the event; it’s the unprocessed stress that got stuck when the right support wasn't there.
I've found it helpful to ask myself:
How did people respond when I was upset as a kid—and how did that shape how I handled stress in the military?
Consider that question again, more slowly this time.
When you’re ready, click the link below to move on to Chapter 2: Brought to the Center.
We’ll explore what it means to find the right kind of support.
