Post Traumatic Growth

Jon Becker: In this episode of The Debrief, we're going to be looking at Post- Traumatic Stress and Post-Traumatic Growth. These are two topics that I'm extremely passionate about because, as you might imagine, each incident we cover in The Debrief has had a profound effect on everyone involved.

Over the years that I've been working with teams and the years that I've hosted this show, I've seen people destroyed by their experiences. Yet, I've also seen others use the trauma they endured to build a stronger, happier, and more purposeful version of themselves. Although I've certainly seen patterns, I've always wondered what separated these two groups of people, which is why I wanted to have this discussion on Post-Traumatic Growth. Simply put, there is a lot we can do to prepare for and respond to traumatic incidents that will reduce the fallout for those involved.

All of my guests today have a different perspective on Post-Traumatic Growth. Dr.

Richard Tedeschi is the world's foremost authority on Post-Traumatic Growth and literally coined the expression. His work forms the foundation for most PTG programs. Josh Goldberg is a CEO of Boulder Crest Foundation, a nonprofit whose Warrior Path and Struggle Well programs have reached over 100,000 people. And finally, Chief Chad Kasmar is the current chief of police in Tucson, Arizona. Following the suicide of a friend and former fellow officer, Chad has led a revolution in the way his city prepares and supports their staff for traumatic incidents. He has a unique perspective on the implementation of these types of programs.

I hope you enjoy this deep dive into Post-Traumatic Growth and that this episode inspires you and your agencies to improve on the way we prepare and treat our warriors and first responders.

My name is Jon Becker. For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

Jon Becker: My first guest is Dr. Richard Tedeschi. Dr. Tedeschi is the world's foremost authority on Post-Traumatic Growth and leads the Boulder Crest Institute where he develops innovative programs helping combat veterans and first responders transform trauma into strength. His groundbreaking work has been recognized among the top 2% of the world's most cited research by Stanford University.

Dr. Tedeschi's academic contributions are remarkable. During his 42-year tenure as a professor of psychological science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, he and colleague Dr. Lawrence Calhoun established the first laboratory dedicated to studying how people change positively through trauma. They coined the term Post-Traumatic Growth in 1995, pioneering an entirely new field of psychological research. For their outstanding scholarship, they received the prestigious First Citizens Bank Scholars Medal.

Dr. Tedeschi has authored growth and has translated decades of academic research into practical applications that are changing lives.

Since 2014, he has worked to establish Boulder Crest as the center of Post- Traumatic Growth work, developing peer-based approaches that make this powerful framework accessible to those who serve our communities.

A fellow of the American Psychological Association's division of Trauma Psychology and frequent media consultant on trauma and resilience, Dr.

Tedeschi brings unparalleled expertise in helping individuals not just recover from trauma but actually grow through their experiences. Rich, thanks so much for being here with me.

Richard Tedeschi: My pleasure.

Jon Becker: Why don't we start with kind of how you got interested in Post- Traumatic Stress and kind of post-trauma?

Richard Tedeschi: Well, actually, I didn't start there. I started with a question about how people become wise. I was interested in that. And so this was back in the 1980s. And my colleague, this was at University of North Carolina Charlotte where I was teaching with Lawrence Calhoun, my colleague. And so we were interested in that question and we decided to talk to people who had been through difficult situations in life thinking that maybe those are the people who learned something from those encounters with difficulty in life. So we started doing interviews with people.

The first ones we did were with people who had suffered some kind of physical disabilities in adulthood, become paralyzed, blinded, that sort of thing. And got in touch with people who had done well, who had been sort of the stars of rehabilitation in our area where we're working. So we just interviewed and sat down and recorded their stories and what had happened to them over the time from before their injuries and what had happened to them and what happened afterwards, and where they came to some point where they thought of life differently and sometimes made remarkable changes in themselves in the aftermath of these events. So that's where we started.

Jon Becker: So then what did you find?

Richard Tedeschi: Well, we found that people told us some things that surprised us in some ways. For example, about a quarter of the people we interviewed said that these things that most people think were terrible were the best things ever happened to them. And they explained why because they led them to change their lives in ways they now valued. And they realized they wouldn't have gotten there otherwise unless they had to go through some different doors that opened to them as a result of these experiences because other doors had been closed as a result of these experiences.

Jon Becker: So, they viewed it as transformative.

Richard Tedeschi: Absolutely. So that in fact that was the first time we wrote a book on that. We titled it trauma and transformation. So that was the title of the first book we wrote on that.

Jon Becker: Interesting. Yeah. Because it's and you do see that right? You see people that are destroyed by it and you see people that are transformed by it. I was think of like a chrysalis and a butterfly kind of relationship. So you start to notice that pattern. What then leads you to continue researching that?

Richard Tedeschi: Well, because it's first of all just listening to the stories of people is a fascinating thing.

Jon Becker: I understand that.

Richard Tedeschi: You understand that. So, that's a good thing. And then and then the other thing is you just learn so much about living life from these people.

They're great teachers if you listen and you have that approach where you think you're going to learn something rather than thinking it all already.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: So that was what just carried me through all these years continuing to do this work.

Jon Becker: You've done this now for 40 years and and and I think are are regarded as one of the originators of the idea behind Post-Traumatic Growth versus I think originally the positioning you had Post-Traumatic Stress disorder which sounds hopeless and deadendish and and I think your early work and and current work focuses more on that transformation and and Post-Traumatic Growth at what point did you start to think of it that way? Like how did it evolve in your thinking?

Richard Tedeschi: Well, first of all it took us about 10 years before we actually came up with the term after we started this whole project. So in some ways it was obvious early. We went to the literature and read a lot of literature on trauma and aftermath of trauma and how people cope with trauma and all of that.

And typically what you find, as you mentioned, is a lot of disorder and symptoms and all of that sort of thing. But you also find these exceptions to that rule, that supposed rule. And there were stories in the literature that we read about and found that indicated that there was another part of this that people were sometimes mentioning but never followed up on. So we just decided we were going to look at that part that people were not paying close enough attention to.

So that's where we found a lot of unexplored territory.

Jon Becker: So now, now looking back doing the work you're currently working, I would love to dig into kind of what happens after a traumatic event and also kind of what defines that line between, what you're debilitated by and you grow from it. Why don't we start with when I'm exposed to a traumatic event, something happens to me, I'm calling you to interview for The Debrief.

Richard Tedeschi: Yes.

Jon Becker: Yes. When that happens, what is the process that I go through?

Richard Tedeschi: Well, the process that leads to what we usually think about as “Post-Traumatic Stress” disorder and similar sorts of outcomes has the same beginning as what leads to Post-Traumatic Growth.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Richard Tedeschi: Okay. That's one thing. Second, let's not think about these things as alternatives.

Jon Becker: Sure.

Richard Tedeschi: They coexist. All right. So what starts in the process that that we've sort of adopted as the kind of understanding what trauma is is it shatters people's understanding of themselves or their lives or the world they live in.

Something that they've always thought was true starts to be questioned.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Richard Tedeschi: All right. And we didn't originate that kind of idea. That's something that we picked up in the psychological literature. Sometimes it was referred to as “The Assumptive World” that becomes shattered. That's the assumptions we make about how things are. Who we are, all of that we don't even question.

Jon Becker: Yeah. The stuff that lets us get out of bed rather than crawling under our bed, , under our bed every day ‘cause we're terrified that something terrible is going to happen.

Richard Tedeschi: Yeah. It's what allows us to function in life just and we don't have to question it because it just is.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: That's what we thought. But then traumatic events, what they do is they tell us maybe what we thought is not really so because these events show that oh maybe it's it's not what I thought.

So that's the first thing and that's really anxiety rousing and confusing for people.

They don't know what to make of it. They don't understand things anymore.

They don't understand themselves or they don't understand the world that they're functioning in, their future as they assumed would be no longer possible for them. It could be any of those kinds of things. They start to question how predictable life is, how controllable things are, how vulnerable they are. Maybe their moral compass.

This is where lately there's been a lot of attention to moral injury as an outcome of a lot of events for people, especially in the military or in law enforcement because sometimes you have to do things that don't comport really closely with what you always thought was the right thing to do. So all these questions start to come up and people are having to sort through all that which is really confusing and difficult.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So you kind of create Cognitive Dissonance between what they believed before the event and what they believe now become disconnected.

Richard Tedeschi: Right? They're not sure now what to believe. It's up for grabs.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Richard Tedeschi: And when it's up for grabs, the good thing is you have a possibility of understanding things better than you used to.

Jon Becker: Sure.

Richard Tedeschi: Coming to a newer understanding of all sorts of things which we can get into. So it starts out as really negative, but it doesn't have to end that way at all.

Jon Becker: But you've taken a variable I mean you've taken something you thought was constant and made it a variable, and so now you are going to redefine it and you can redefine it negatively or you can redefine it positively depending on the process.

Richard Tedeschi: Right, depending on the process.

Jon Becker: Right. I am involved in an airplane crash. I can come to the conclusion that this was a one-off and it'll never happen again and I can feel safe in the world or I can never walk under or near another airplane for the rest of my life and be terrified of them forever.

Richard Tedeschi: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, or some of both.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay. So, I go through this process where now I'm questioning some or maybe perhaps, I think of it like a law enforcement shooting. I mean, you're defining, you talk to guys that have been in traumatic events and it undermines their confidence. That undermines their beliefs about their own ability to protect themselves, their ability to protect their families, their tactics, all of these things kind of come into question. What's the next thing that happens as I start that process?

Richard Tedeschi: Well, the next thing that happens is people start to think about this stuff repeatedly. They ruminate. They wonder “Why did this happen?

Why did this happen to me?” Or they wonder about what we call counterfactuals.

That is they try to counter the facts of what's happened with kind of wishes and say, "Oh, I wish it had happened differently” or they start to think about how they could have done something different to prevent it or to have a different outcome."

So they go through a lot of preoccupation with what has happened to them and they can't get this stuff out of their minds which makes them very anxious and distractible and makes it difficult to function. They start to kind of break down over that because they feel out of control of themselves and their own thinking.

So it's really quite a mess.

So, their emotions become very dysregulated because now they feel out of control of their thinking and therefore they think that they're weak, or they're never going to be able to function right or it just really snowballs into a lot of negative stuff. So, that's kind of the first step in this process. It sounds bad and it is. This is where you get the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress or Acute Stress Disorder or that sort of thing. All right. So, that's kind of the first phase of this.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Richard Tedeschi: All right.

Jon Becker: So, yeah, you're starting to almost. You can see where that's going to feed into itself, too, right? My world has become more unstable. I'm not really trusting things that I used to trust and now it's all I think about and I can't control my thinking. And because I can't control my thinking, then I'm maybe even more weak than I thought I was. And now I'm physically agitated all the time because I'm thinking about all this horrible shit and then I can't sleep which is then going to like you can see where this just becomes a cycle that feeds itself.

Richard Tedeschi: Exactly. All the things you talk about are exactly the way it happens for people and like you say it's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy after a while. You start to think of yourself as damaged and disordered, and then too often somebody gives you a diagnosis that confirms that you're damaged and disordered and you're not coming back from that. People think about these diagnoses as well as life sentences.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I go see an inexperienced psychologist, psychiatrist, doctor, whoever who says, "Oh, you have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. You're going to have this for the rest of your life." And my already hopeless mindset now is like, "Well, I'm just screwed."

Richard Tedeschi: I remember talking to a fellow who taught at West Point and when he was teaching the basic psychological concepts and things like that, he would pull his classes and ask people “How many of you think that you're going to end up with PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress disorder as a result of your service?”

and almost all of them thought that that was what was going to happen to them.

Jon Becker: They build a self-fulfilling prophecy of it.

Richard Tedeschi: Exactly.

Jon Becker: Okay. So, it strikes me that at that point you're in a pretty vulnerable state and you're kind of at an inflection point. You can already see kind of setting this up, you're going to get better from this or you're going to get worse from this, and initially it sounds like it's going to kind of try to pull you down the drain.

What's the next step in that process?

Richard Tedeschi: Okay. So, let's talk about the inflection point then. Okay. So, people start to of course wonder about themselves. All right.

Jon Becker: Sure.

Richard Tedeschi: Which is really unpleasant in a lot of ways but can be a good thing. So people do a lot of self-analysis. They may start to try to learn something about what they're going through, and that can lead to some steps along the way that might be good for them in the long term. Also, (and this is something you know about very well), people feel compelled to tell what they're going through, tell their story. The problem is sometimes they don't have the right outlet, the right person to tell their story to.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: Or they've been told that they shouldn't.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Or they're put under a federal gag order for five or 10 years.

Richard Tedeschi: There you go.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: All right. But people would like to tell their story if who they told their story to would listen and accept and not judge them. So finding someone like that when that starts to happen this whole thing can change-- that's the inflection point.

All right. Now, in a lot of trauma focused therapies, there's a thing about telling the story of what happened, the traumatic event. That's important. But too often they stop there. They think that that's the end of the story, this traumatic event, and they try to have people retell the traumatic event over and over again until they don't feel too much from telling the story anymore, like habituating to it.

All right. Unfortunately, that's not what's going to heal people. They have to then talk about what happens next. This stuff happened, and told the story of it. Now what? Now you start having to deal with what's happened in the aftermath of this. And that's where we focus our attention. The aftermath of this event. What's going to happen going forward?

Jon Becker: Yeah, because telling the story of how you got hit by a bus stops being interesting to people when the bus hits you. And so as you're telling the story to people, once the event is over in their brain, the story's done and they're not interested anymore. And so I can see where you would get into the habit of telling the story, let's say it's a shooting, telling the story right up through the shooting and then that's where it ends. And you're just kind of reinforcing the negativity of the event and never moving beyond the story.

Richard Tedeschi: Yeah. You're short circuiting the process if you just stop there and the person's life becomes defined by that event.

Jon Becker: Yes.

Richard Tedeschi: In a negative way. Right. So we have to move beyond that to the next part and allow people to see that there is another part. There is a possibility. There is a future. And that's a future that doesn't define them according to whatever it is that's happened to them. And it may be one event. It may be a whole lot of events. It may be a story that includes things that happened in their childhood. It could be a lot of things.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: Because it's a whole life story that we start to take a look at what people have been like, how they've come across and encountered certain terrible things perhaps, but also what the future may hold. What the next chapters of this story might look like.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I hadn't thought about that. Like if you grew up in an abusive home and took control of your life by becoming a police officer and overcame your childhood and then get in a fight with a suspect who beats you like you were a child, you're going to re-trigger all of that trauma and now you're having to overcome the fact that you thought you overcame it and didn't, right? But it's going to completely just undermine the foundation of who you think you are.

Richard Tedeschi: Yeah. Yeah. Because for example, many people get into the military and law enforcement and whatnot because they've had difficult childhoods.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: And they've been told things about how they're not worth anything or they've been abused in some way or whatnot. And then they develop a way of living a life of service and doing something that they feel is a strength in them. But then in the midst of that somewhere some things can happen that might make them wonder about themselves again. And that hearkens back to the earlier times and those terrible messages and all of that. It kind of compounds all the early things and the things that are happening more recently. It becomes something very difficult for people to come to terms with.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Yeah. It's not an event. It's an entire life arc narrative now.

Richard Tedeschi: That's right. Entire life arc narrative. That's right.

Jon Becker: You can see where and as you're as you're telling me this I'm thinking to myself like when people tell the story to friends to families in debriefs I typically end my debrief with where are you right now and what have you gotten through this. But most of the time you tell the story you tell the story right up until the shooting ends and so now you're going around you're telling the story you're being defined by the story. Now you're the guy that got hit by the bus and you're not Rich anymore. You're just the guy got hit by the bus and you tell the story to the point that the bus hits you and like you it literally again you have another self-fulfilling prophecy that your life is defined by the event but you never move past the end of the event. It just stops at the event.

Richard Tedeschi: Right.

Jon Becker: It's terrifying.

Richard Tedeschi: It is. So in order to move beyond that, hopefully you find some people who are going to listen to you in a different way, not just be engrossed in the the stories of negativity and the terrible things that happened and whatnot, but paying attention to the possibilities and the strengths, capabilities, what's changing, something else that's maybe not well articulated by the person themselves, not even noticed by the person themselves, but you start to draw that out and point the person in the direction of, “Okay, that's not the only thing here. There's more to this than that.” okay.

So, one of the things that we talk about, for example, at Boulder Crest is that we try to get the message across that it's not what's wrong with you, it's what happened to you. It's not what's wrong with you. It's what happened to you. So, if you carry a diagnosis of PTSD or something like that it starts to sound like, well, something wrong with you, right? I mean, it's a disorder. You've got a disorder, something wrong with you. But we have to educate people on the fact that what they're feeling and what they're thinking, what they're doing is the expected result of being through terrible circumstances as a human being.

So, just as you suffer a physical injury when you're hit by something physically and we wouldn't say that you're disordered, you're injured.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: So, same thing psychologically, , when you're hit by something psychologically, it's not that you're disordered, you're injured. All right?

Jon Becker: Yeah. Something happened to you.

Richard Tedeschi: Something happened to you. It's not because there's something wrong with you. It's because, just as your body is going to bleed when there's nothing wrong with your body, it's supposed to bleed under these circumstances. What's happening to you psychologically is supposed to happen under these kinds of circumstances where you go through all these things that I just mentioned. That's typical. That's normal.

So, we have to help people understand that they can view themselves as having been injured by these kinds of events, these circumstances. But people heal from injuries. All right? And there's nothing wrong with the things that you're experiencing. It doesn't indicate that you're weak or that you're disordered or that this is the end of the story or any of that. It's just that, “Oh, this is what happens to people when these things happen to people.

Jon Becker: Yeah. You just got hit by a bus. It's perfectly reasonable for you to be concerned about buses.

Richard Tedeschi: Exactly.

Jon Becker: And you have to now deal with the fallout from being hit by a bus.

Richard Tedeschi: But when you start to listen to people's stories from this point of view where you allow them to see that you're not surprised by what they're experiencing and it's you're not judging them for it and it's understandable they can relax a little bit. And this brings on the other thing. They start to relax into a different way of thinking about this.

Maybe being curious about it rather than upset about it or judging themselves for it. Instead of being curious, “Oh, so what's happening to me?” So many times when I start to explain to people their physical and psychological reactions to trauma and I put it up on the whiteboard and draw it out and things like that.

Jon Becker: Just doing that they oh so that's what this is about. You mean I'm not crazy?

Richard Tedeschi: No, you're not. You're human. All right.

Jon Becker: They relax and they start to get curious about this whole thing they're going through. Start to think about it differently as something they want to know about and understand. Not think about in terms of “I'm weak”, “I'm no good” or whatever none of that. “Oh so let me understand myself as a human being now”.

So there's that and then we can also enter into some ways to help them calm the central nervous system part of where they're doing all the symptoms of PTSD, stuff easily startled or anxious or when they think of the things that happen, they reexperience them in really negative ways and all that stuff. So, we help them regulate their emotions and tolerate distress better because when they can do that, then they can work even more on what's happened and what they're really all about and where they're going to take their lives into the future into something that's positive and useful. So help them calm, help them think and explore some more with someone who's a listener. We call them “expert companions”. People are companions through this and their expertise is how to be a companion rather than someone who's going to say, “You need treatment”.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: Or “You're disordered and we're going to give you this diagnosis and therefore we know what's wrong with you and we're going to do this to you”. No, you're still a person with all these capabilities and we're going to accompany you on this process, this pathway into a future where we know you're not only going to recover, but you're going to change because going through these changes you're not going to go back to baseline you're going to change. And you can change in some ways that believe me you're going to value as a result of going through all this. So that's the pathway that we start to talk about.

Jon Becker: It's funny because as you're saying that like just the words you use feels like the difference between us sitting across from a table and me saying “Look at what happened to you. Tell me about this”, or me putting my arm around you from your side of the table and saying, “Hey let's walk through the story”.

Richard Tedeschi: Well let's walk through it together.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And it's and it's funny because doing the debrief, interviewing so many teams that have had traumatic events. There are so many of the things that you're saying that resonated with the things that I'm seeing in teams that are going through trauma and are getting through it. And it is this validation. It's sitting with people who have had similar experiences who can say, "Hey man, like this isn't going to define you. I've been through this. My life was dramatically different afterwards.

Things can get better." Like I think of the conversations that I witness all the time, , when we connect teams together and you watch guys just go from wilted to to to blowering simply by the fact that somebody goes, "Hey, man, you did the right thing and it's going to be okay." And it's like, , as an alpha male, your brain is like, "Oh, that's that's stupid." But I've watched it work so many times and I've watched it you can see its reposition in guys' brains.

And as you're describing I'm thinking of like the event not defining you look at the guys that that we look to now who have been Nick Avery or Justin Dodge guys who had have lost their legs and you're like well their careers are like I interviewed Justin Dodge and Justin's reaction is like “Yeah the firetruck tore my leg off like okay like my leg got torn off great, how I'm going to operate with one leg?” And it wasn't this mindset of “I'm a victim and I'm destroyed” and like he was thinking about how he was going to work out on the way to the hospital. It's just that mindset shifts to viewing it as something that happened to you versus who you are. I really love the way that you position that because it makes so much more sense when you think of it that way.

From your perspective from a best practices standpoint, so often when I talk to people that have been through events, what I hear is, obviously the first couple of people that they come in contact with really impact the way they feel about the event whether it's the chief of police coming to them and saying, "Hey, man, you did the right thing. Thank you so much." Or, "Oh, we need you to go in this room because we're going to conduct a criminal investigation." Now from your perspective, what are those best practices in the way we initially deal with people and the way we deal with them after an event?

Richard Tedeschi: It doesn't make sense to think that in the aftermath of these sorts of incidents that you debrief people on that before the incidents happened, we would think that they were such great operators, strong people, capable, reliable, smart, and all that. And then right after the event, we treat them like none of those things make any sense. Suddenly treating them as if they do the wrong thing. They don't make sense. We don't trust them. How could they go from being so strong and reliable and we trust them with such important decisions and all that to people that suddenly we don't trust at all and they don't make sense to us. And that's crazy, isn't it?

Jon Becker: It really is. And when you stop and look at it from that perspective, I put a machine gun in your hands sent you into a hostage rescue because I trusted you and then you'd be able to do it and because you got shot now, well, we're going to put you on admin leave and you're not allowed to talk to anybody and we're going to treat you like a criminal and just go sit at home because now you're a worthless piece of shit.

Richard Tedeschi: Yeah. That doesn't make a bit of sense.

Jon Becker: No.

Richard Tedeschi: It doesn't. And so it's not surprising that when people are treated that way in the aftermath that they have all kinds of problems because suddenly they're not the same person anymore. “I've been told I'm not the same person and someone that you don't trust, right?” And you take away from them their purpose, what's meaningful to them. You isolate them from other people.

You prevent them from working through what's happened because they can't talk about it. It's crazy.

Jon Becker: And their identity is already in a state of flux and you're taking away what remains of their identity and you're taking away their tribe.

Richard Tedeschi: Yes. Exactly.

Jon Becker: So you lose purpose, tribe, and identity.

Richard Tedeschi: Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's right.

Jon Becker: In many cases, because you did the right thing.

Richard Tedeschi: Yes. That's right.

Jon Becker: So it's not surprising that then people have trouble.

Richard Tedeschi: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Do you think?

Richard Tedeschi: Yeah. And then we blame it on them.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: Right.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Then we send them to an inexperienced therapist who says, "Oh, you have Post-Traumatic Stress disorder."

Jon Becker: Yes.

Richard Tedeschi: There's something wrong with you.

Jon Becker: Exactly. Right.

Richard Tedeschi: So, we treat them this way. They have trouble processing all of what's happened to them. We take away what they've done best so they can't do it anymore for some length of time or whatever. I mean it's just a recipe for disaster.

Jon Becker: How do we not do that?

Richard Tedeschi: Well, one of the things that you were just talking about a minute ago is when you get people together talking about their experiences and comparing notes like this, they find out that “Oh, I'm not the only one” or “You went through that too” or that's how you think that's what you're that's really that's really powerful.

I really think that group methods can be so important in getting people together who have experienced similar kinds of things and just finding out that what they went through is universal. Okay, it's human. “Oh, so I'm okay because you seem okay to me”. I mean, these things can be really powerful experiences. So that's one thing. Getting people in a position where they can trust who they talk to so they can truly disclose about their experiences. That's crucial. All right. And then taking the chaos of it and organizing all that seems chaotic into something that makes sense for them. So you say, "Oh, I've been so confused. This is crazy. I thought bad about. No. Okay. And now you're making sense. You're helping me make sense of this whole experience.

So when you intervene in these things, what you're really trying to do is organize the chaos, all right, into something that's no longer chaotic, that makes sense.

This can be understood. So now I can understand myself. “Oh, I'm not crazy. I'm not a crazy chaotic thinker. No, I can make sense of this.” All right.

So there's all that and then another part of the best practice is to recognize Post- Traumatic Growth when it's developing. All right? So we talk about those five different areas of Post-Traumatic Growth that our research has shown people report.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Richard Tedeschi: So you watch out for these things. You watch out for people talking about deepening relationships, how they are getting closer to somebody or they feel more compassion for people. They feel more connected with someone. All right, so there's that. They talk about appreciating life, becoming grateful for things that they took for granted before, appreciating simple things in life perhaps, but appreciating their own lives, seeing the value in living. All right, so that's something.

They talk about new possibilities where they have maybe new priorities, new interests, something that they think is important to do. So look for those new possibilities that they talk about.

Their personal strength, where they see themselves as maybe stronger than they thought they were. What they've come through that indicates to them that they do have strength, they're capable of doing things, handling things.

And then spiritual and existential changes. This is where people start to think about living life as a meaningful and purposeful endeavor that they have to get clear about. Given the time I've got on this earth, what's the best way for me to spend it? What's going to be my contribution? How can I be of service? What's going to be most meaningful for me given the things that are difficult, why live through all that? Is there something that I can make of this so that it's not all in vain? For example, when you lose someone on your team, do you want to live in a way that maybe honors their memory? Right? That could be meaningful when this person has died, but not in vain because you're going to make sure that that's not the case. You're going to keep them remembered and you're going to make sure that you live in a way that maybe is even better.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: Because of their sacrifice. Something like that can happen for people. That's what we talk about spiritual and existential change.

Jon Becker: Walk me through those five one more time.

Richard Tedeschi: Okay. So we got personal strength, seeing yourself, your strength, your capabilities, your changed relationships with other people, deepened relationships where you can connect with other people in a different way, perhaps because you've learned how to talk about your story, disclose, and somebody has listened to you with concern. So there's that appreciation of life.

Great appreciation of life.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: New possibilities, new interests, new priorities, and spiritual and existential change where you start to grapple with the meaning of life, the purpose for life, how you're going to live it in a way where in the end you don't have regrets, things of that kind. So those kinds of dimensions.

Jon Becker: What is fascinating to me about that is one, I see that happening, right? The guys who make it through the events that we debrief and and thrive afterwards, I see all five of those things happen to them over the time that they're developing. But two, and what I find most dramatic about that is the way that we treat officers that have been involved in a shooting or families that have lost a member of their family is we literally undermine all five of those things. We treat them like criminals. We take away their identity. We separate them from their tribe. We take away the higher purpose that they were already feeling in their lives and it's like you hear it described like that and you just think like no wonder it goes to shit.

Richard Tedeschi: That's right.

Jon Becker: Like we're literally doing the exact opposite thing of what we should be doing.

Richard Tedeschi: That's right. In fact, in some of our research we've looked at we call post-traumatic depreciation. It's the flip side of Post-Traumatic Growth.

And that's what you just described. , all these things can go negative. , your relationships with people break down.

You see yourself as weak. All meaningless life. there's no possibility for you. You life doesn't have any purpose and meaning anymore, so you don't appreciate it, so you might as well kill yourself. All these things there. There's that. And there's ways you drive people into that by how you treat them, just like you said.

Jon Becker: Yeah, man. It's just it's so…

Richard Tedeschi: Talk about a criminal investigation. That's where it should be, right?

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, we're going to do a criminal investigation. Let's do it in the way that we treat people. And I mean, the number of teams that I have worked with and sat through with The Debrief that you hear what happened to them and you go and like and I see this all the time and I'm sure you're probably saying the same thing. The majority of guys that I'm dealing with on the debrief who really have lasting effects of these events are more traumatized by the way they were treated by family, friends in the department than they are by the event.

Richard Tedeschi: That's exactly why we look at the aftermath of the event so much more than the event itself. Because the event itself doesn't have to be terrible for them in their lives, but the way they get treated in the aftermath of the event makes all the difference in the world. And that's where we put our focus because that's where all the possibilities are.

Now, I want to make sure that there's something else that we clear on this and that is because we move in this direction of Post-Traumatic Growth doesn't mean that we overlook the terrible things that have happened to people.

Jon Becker: Sure.

Richard Tedeschi: We don't sugarcoat all that. We admit that there's that side of the story, too. Of course.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: And that people continue to have distress about that. It doesn't mean they stop thinking about it or they don't think it was terrible. No, there's ongoing distress about that. But that distress can be what kind of helps them keep the edge of this growth because they remember these terrible things.

And when they start to engage in PTG (Post-Traumatic Growth), they can remember that this is what they're doing now to make that event something different than merely distressing. It's that that event is a catalyst and it continues to be a catalyst for what they do. Just like I was saying a moment ago, if you want to honor someone that you lost on your team, you don't forget about them. You keep remembering them and you keep their memory alive over years. And that spurs you on to make sure that you continue to live well or do these things that are of service or whatever, however you define the way, you honor them.

So the continuing distress is not a bad thing as long as it's at a level where you take it as a motivator for you to do well.

Jon Becker: Well, and it strikes me also that it's not going to be a linear process, right? Like you're not going to be, “Oh, I'm a 10 bad and tomorrow I’m a 9 bad.”

This strikes me as you're looking at the trend. Are we going in the right direction?

There's going to be setbacks. There's going to be amazing days. There's going to be bad days. But, are you trending in a direction of growth?

Richard Tedeschi: That's exactly right. So this is something that happens over time. You talked about the guy who lost his leg and on the way to the hospital he decided but for a lot of people it doesn't happen like that.

Jon Becker: Of course, it happens over a long period of time and we talk about a struggle involved in this that Post-Traumatic Growth is a process of going through a struggle in the aftermath of these traumatic events that does lead to one or more of these five outcomes that I mentioned to you. Right? So, it's a process that involves struggle, having to think through things, figure things out, redefine yourself in some ways, redefine your priorities in life, all of that stuff.

It's not an easy path. And there are setbacks along this path. Other things are going to happen to you, too. This is the last bad thing that's going to happen.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: There's others, but maybe when other bad things happen, you can start to think about them in the context of this growth oriented mindset instead of the depreciation, the disorder and all of that. And that will allow you to carry through.

And the other thing is there's a lot of talk in psychology these days in popular literature about “happiness”. How to become happy and Post-Traumatic Growth is not happiness. It's more profound than that because there's a poignancy to it that out of some of the worst things that have happened to you in life comes some of the wisdom that we've we started with, right? so there's this paradox of the bad and the good all mixed up together. There's the paradox of recognizing your vulnerability can lead to you also recognizing your strength because when you're clear on your vulnerability, you're in a much better position. People in the military know this very well, right? If your commanding officer doesn't recognize vulnerability in terms of your position on the battlefield or your equipment or your training or number of troops, they're going to make some bad plans.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: You better know your vulnerability. So vulnerability, knowledge of that, understanding that can be a strength because then individually it can lead you to connect with people that you can trust to find help when you need it to not go it alone. That's a strength.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: Yeah. So there's all these paradoxes that you have to start to think in terms of to get to Post-Traumatic Growth. Out of your grief can come gratitude for what you have. What you've lost can allow you to appreciate what you've got. That's a paradox. There's all that sort of thing. The basic one is that out of loss comes some kind of gain, something that you value. So be able to think that way is a way of understanding life because life is a mixture of all of that. So Post-Traumatic Growth allows people to be wiser about how to live life, how to understand it.

So that's part of this process that is a continuing thing. This Post-Traumatic Growth is not a destination you arrive at. It's a continuing process of living as I think you're suggesting here.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: It's complicated and it goes through all kinds of deepening over time. where you think you've you've kind of got it and you understand things and then you realize, “Oh, there's another level”, and you become more and more cognizant of how complicated life is in some ways, but paradoxically how simple it is too.

Jon Becker: It also strikes me that this is not an intuitive process, right? I recently wrote an article about low-level blast and cognitive mild traumatic brain injury and in the process of doing the research for that and and in the process of doing all the debriefs that I've come to this realization that we especially as alpha males, but as human beings we have this impression that our brains should just be an intuitive thing. We should be able to unscrew our own brain. We should be able to think our way out of these kinds of situations. We don't think that, you tear a cartilage in your knee and you don't go, "Well, I'm just going to think my way out of this, right?" Like, you go to a doctor and get your freaking knee fixed.

But there is this kind of counterintuitive notion that we have that is like, "Oh, I should be able to think my way out of this." As you're describing this, it doesn't strike me that it's going to be intuitive. It strikes me that we need to get help.

Richard Tedeschi: Well, yes. And it's foolish to think that we have to reinvent this wheel. This is a very old wheel.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Richard Tedeschi: As long as there's been people, there's been trauma. As long as there's been trauma, there's been Post-Traumatic Growth. All right. You can look back to the ancients, the Greeks, the Romans, they talk about this. You find it in all religions and all cultures. This is the human story of what you do with suffering, so we don't have to figure it out all by ourselves.

We can reflect back on what other people have written about this and what other people have experienced about it. We don't have to go it alone. That's the thing.

We can rely on people who have lived thousands of years ago because they had wisdom about this and people that are around us today.

Jon Becker: But either way, we need to seek help.

Richard Tedeschi: That's right. Don't go it alone. Find an expert companion or more than one hopefully people who can listen to you in a way where they want to learn what's going on with you, what happened. They want to learn without giving easy advice or platitudes or just tapping on the shoulder saying “It'll be okay”, or “I know you're strong”. “You'll get through it” or something that just doesn't allow people to get into the depth of things and to really talk about what they're struggling with. So, finding an expert companion that really is going to listen and is also going to see in you the possibilities and the strengths and notice them and mention them and say, “There's some things happening that you may not notice that I think are really important”.

Jon Becker: Next, I'm joined by Josh Goldberg, the chief executive officer of Boulder Crest Foundation, a national nonprofit dedicated to helping first responders, combat veterans, and their families thrive despite trauma and stress.

Since becoming the organization's first CEO in January of 2023, Josh oversees all operations and programs that have reached more than a 100,000 individuals, helping them transform struggle into strength through pioneering applications of Post-Traumatic Growth science.

Josh's leadership at Boulder Crest has revolutionized trauma recovery through innovative programs like “Warrior Path” and “Struggle Well”. He's also coauthored two influential books, “Struggle Well - Thriving in the Aftermath of Trauma” and “Transformed by Trauma” that share these transformative approaches.

Boulder Crest is a nonprofit organization focused on preventing and treating post-traumatic injury and their work is truly making a difference in this community.

Thanks for being here with me today.

Josh Goldberg: Thanks for having me.

Jon Becker: So let's start with kind of the origin story of Boulder Crest because I think we've got to understand that to understand best practices.

Josh Goldberg: For sure. Boulder Crest grew out of the work of a Navy bomb disposal tech named Ken Faulk and his wife. And Ken early on in the wars has spent a lot of time in hospitals with severely injured bomb disposal personnel.

And he was watching them with this attitude that he couldn't imagine having in the aftermath of their injury, like they're setting goals every day. They're going to crush it. They're going to use less pills. They're going to be doing all these things.

And he then started to meet veterans who did not have physical injuries, who were struggling in ways that he wasn't seeing at the hospital. And he really started to get curious about why certain people thrived in the aftermath of trauma and other people didn't. And in the midst of that, we started to have dialogue with a range of mental health professionals. And Ken had opened with Julia, his wife, with Boulder Crest, the first privately funded retreat center in the country for combat veterans and their families. And started to go around and figure out what we want to do with this place we had, and talked to mental health professionals to say what enables people who are struggling to live a good life. And these were serious heavy hitters in the mental health world. And what they told us was that “nothing works to help people who are struggling to live a good life. And that the best we could do is try to help them manage and mitigate the symptoms of their distress”.

In the wake of that, of course, we have a suicide epidemic that's plagued this country for a long time dating back to Vietnam, if not before. And we felt a little bit hopeless until we met a guy at UNC Charlotte named Rich Toescue who started to describe the work that he'd been doing for a couple of decades in Post- Traumatic Growth. And we looked at Rich and said, "Rich, can we teach people who are struggling, who don't see hope, could we teach them to experience Post- Traumatic Growth?" And Rich said, "I don't know if it's possible, but I'm willing to give it a shot." And that began this effort in 2014 to figure out how to bring these practices and principles of Post-Traumatic Growth to people in the world who are struggling. And importantly, because we now live in a world where people at police academies think they're going to get PTSD as an inevitable consequence of the job if you got to get left to boom. You have to get in early and often and help shape the perspective of people engaged in work where they will be exposed to trauma both professionally and personally.

Jon Becker: SI mean, it's an amazing story. So, so walk me through kind of he figures this out and starts to build this thing and like how does how does it take off? Like what happens?

Josh Goldberg: So for about 6 months when we first opened September of 2013 to May March of We're like, okay, this stuff's not it. We met Tedeschi, we started talking to Rich about PTG and it's like, okay, we want to build a program based on this. And so what we had was a sense of wanted a peer-based program where trust was the highest and you got rid of all the bullshit of who did the whatever deployments whatever it was and started to figure out how would we go about catalyzing people's curiosity and interest to understand PTG and and just start to AR the hell out of it.

So we run a program, it started in June of ‘14. We ran a bunch of programs that year, a bunch the next year, late nights, long days, just trying to figure out how we get this right with groups of about six veterans at the time. And by the end of 2015, we really felt like it all clicked. And we were like, “Okay, this is what it looks like”. We brought in Rich, brought in another psychologist, Brett Moore, came in and they said, “We've never seen anything like this”. In 2 days, you make breakthroughs that would take us at least 12 to 14 months.

What we're seeing in this active effort to facilitate Post Traumatic Growth is not something we could have foreseen but it's something that's mind-blowing and you started to see people come back to life. I think you've described watching people “go from like a wilted flower to blossoming” is to see that in two days to see the light come back into people's eyes to see their posture shift and all of a sudden realize like “Holy shit my life isn't over and it actually just starting” was an amazing thing.

So we started doing that work. It went well. We did an 18-month study, make sure the stuff works, not just while people are with us, but for the long term. And then that led us to sort of rapid expansion of our efforts. So from about 2014 to 2020, we now have 11 teams around the country that do our Warrior Path program, which is our flagship program for combat vets and first responders who are struggling. And then the question becomes, if you wait in these communities for people to get to bad places to acknowledge they need help, you may be waiting too long because you're going to have suicide, substance abuse, domestic violence, all sorts of bad outcomes. You've got to get left.

Struggle Well is our effort to bring PTG into the first responder culture, into the military culture, and say, how do we start to have a different conversation about this stuff early and often to catalyze people's willingness to do the things they need to do to live a healthy and constructive existence while they do these jobs when they get out, but also if they encounter great difficulty, do they know where to turn and have they already heard about some of these? You're planting seeds so that people when they encounter this stuff they don't have to go through such a rocky road that we hear often far too often.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So, hence the name Struggle Well.

Josh Goldberg: Yep.

Jon Becker: It's not Struggle Well, it's Struggle, Well because you're going to struggle.

Josh Goldberg: And that's the biggest thing that continues to surprise me having been in rooms with tens of thousands of people at this point is people saying, "I thought I was the only one." And I'm like, "How could you think that?" But I've been through and don't have any background in this world in my own civilian world but civilian life has been through a great struggle and I understand struggle is so isolating. It's the most universal part of the human experience, the most isolating part of the same experience. You feel like no one will understand it.

You feel broken. You feel defective.

One of the challenges is that you think about the tactical community, the special operations community, people who can do incredible things, highly competent people believe that they can figure out life and then all of a sudden by the time they realize they don't know what they're doing, it's late. And there's a lot of shame in that and a lot of struggle in that and acknowledging things like “My life's become unmanageable. I don't know what to do about it”. And so for us, when I think about this Army research that came out in about 14 or to take their lives that were unsuccessful. They said, "Why didn't you ever go to mental health?" Because like 66% never went. And they said, "We thought we could figure it out on their own." It's like, cool. If people want to figure it out, then teach them how to do it. It's not that they're bad at it. No one's ever tried to teach them, "Hey, life is this. How do we navigate this? And that's where really for us PTG is all about trying to get left to boom and having these conversations with people about life and how to navigate it.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's interesting as you're saying that I'm thinking of the very skill set that makes you a good cop, the very skill set that makes you a good tactical operator, the ability to handle complicated situations, the ability to take care of yourself, the ability to operate on your own. Courage is counterintuitive to recovering, right? The fact that you are self-reliant and so strong is not helping you here, right? The fact that your whole life you've been able to figure things out is not helping. It's making you think that there's something wrong with you because you can't figure it out now.

Josh Goldberg: Yeah. And you have that individual context and you have a societal context of all sorts of diagnosable conditions for every single mental health ailment. And you layer all that stuff together and it's easy to see a world where someone who thinks they ought to be able to do something because they're taught to be self-reliant, all of a sudden doesn't know how to do it. And these cultures are now staring down the barrel of “Oh shit, if I am struggling, it means I must have that thing. And that thing means the end of everything I hold sacred”. And it increases the risk that they're not going to tell anybody because they don't want to open that door in that Pandora's box that's going to then take over their life and ruin everything.

We feel like we've made so much progress on things like stigma and telling people to talk about it. But the reality is we haven't because that's been concurrent to an increase in awareness about all these diagnosable conditions.

And so now it's like if I talk about it and I struggle then it means I have some kind of a condition. And if I don't have a condition, I'm a psychopath because I should be affected by these lifestyles. And that's the part where when I look at this stuff, it's like my fundamental drive is we have got to shift the context of this conversation. It is the wrong conversation and we are aiding the destruction of great men and women. That's what we are doing by having this conversation in the lens of diagnosability. And most things that people go through are problems in living. They just exceed our capacity to deal with them. They're not mental health conditions. If we can depathologize our world, we can democratize mental health, we'll be in a much better shape. And that's been the focus of our effort since we started and it'll be the focus of the rest of my life. We have a lot of work to do but I hope I live a long life and I have another 50 years to go and we can make serious progress on shifting this narrative which is a victim narrative.

General Mattis said, “Victimhood in America is exalted today”.

Jonathan Height said that “The prevailing ethic in American society is what doesn't kill us makes us weaker”.

I fear that stuff is creeping into the warrior class. And I think it is a tragedy and I fear what it means for national security, and the security of our communities because I think we're destroying the strongest people among us by convincing them that they're going to be victims of the thing they love the most which is their work.

Jon Becker: Yeah. You can see it in recruitment and law enforcement. You can see it in military recruitment like we've seen it in society across the board, right?

It literally becomes like the Suffer Olympics now. Everybody wants to tell you what's wrong with them and how what they have is just so unique and they're so special. And one of the things that I frequently say to guys after we do a debrief is, “I know you feel like you're unique and I know you feel like this is that you're the only person that ever had to happen. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you you're not fucking special. Everybody that's been through this feels just like you do. I'm sorry if I'm taking the wings off the unicorn, but like you're not unique.”

We have come to a point in society where we are deifying the fact that you had such a traumatic upbringing. I mean it's insane that that's what we're doing. And you can see where part of the problem is nobody's teaching anybody how to cope with shit. We've gone away from the days when you learned how to deal with things. And one of the slides I use when I teach the lessons learned from The Debrief says it turns out Ibuprofen and Bourbon are not the solution to every problem. Right. And that's kind of where we are.

One of the things that made me want to have this conversation with you is this notion of not only are you going to use Warrior Path, like if you've been through a traumatic event and you're dealing with it, we're going to give you some tools to help facilitate that. But what I think is very interesting about Struggle Well is we're going to give you some of those tools before it happens.

Talk to me a little bit about how Struggle Well actually works. What are you trying to accomplish in training people?

Josh Goldberg: Two major goals in Struggle Well: One is normalized struggle.

Every human being goes through struggle. We were talking about earlier and I think helping people understand like these are the normal responses that we have to struggle. This is what we do when we struggle. So our thoughts go this way. Our feelings go this way. Our actions go this way. If that's you, you ain't fucking special. Sorry to tell you just like you said. I've said the same thing many times. And then to normalize struggle and normalize growth in the aftermath of struggle. So there's this twin part of educating people about the impacts of stress and struggle and also educating people about the opportunities to grow. Part one is normalization.

And then the second is the democratization of support. So this idea of how do we upskill everyone's emotional intelligence about mental health. And I say that because when I was going through a deep struggle in my life, I was at a Dick Sporting Goods garage trying to do something nice for my mom and I called my best friend in the world and he said, "How are you?" And I said, "I'm not okay.

Like I'm scared. I don't understand what's happening right now." but like I'm not okay. And he goes, "You should probably talk to someone." And he's British. And I said, "Listen, motherfucker." I said, "I am talking to someone. I'm talking to the only person on the face of the earth I would tell this to. But you aren't equipped to listen or don't feel like you can."

We have to make sure people are able to listen and not get scared because they don't know how to say the right words because they're worried if they say the wrong words, someone's going to kill themselves. And just sit with somebody and be able to be that companion, that guide for somebody when they're going through it. That's the other piece to us is if it's true that people want to figure this stuff out on their own, if it's true that most people are going to turn to people in their orbit, then let's increase the emotional intelligence of that orbit where people can then do this stuff in their lives and help support other people.

So those are the twin objectives. The primary way we do that and it grew out of Warrior Path. Warrior Path is this 89 day program, 7 days on the ground, 75 hours. It's going away. But when we come into the culture, it's like, “Okay, we know that these ideas of posttraumatic growth have great salience and resonance”.

The most common response we get when we tell people about it is why the fuck has nobody told me this? All I've ever been told is how I'm going to be damaged and diminished. So, it's going into the culture and doing 5-8 hour days, a 40-hour training program where we start to introduce these concepts of Post-Traumatic Growth. Also, it's super important to say something delivered by peers. And those programs start with peers talking about their story, but not the war story of just all the bad shit that happened, but the whole story of their own experiences, their own learnings, their own lessons, their own wisdom. And you're starting to model to people like this is a space where we don't play games.

This is a space where we don't wear masks. It's a space where we talk about our shit and we own our stuff. And we can do that without judgment and diagnosis and shame and all the other stuff is we listen to people. And so we start that and we just start to lay the foundation of, "Have you heard of PTSD?" Of course you have. Have you heard of Post-Traumatic Growth? No. We are going to spend the next 5 days talking about this, reflecting on this and thinking about how we've been through it in our lives and how we can continue to grow in our lives.

It is a conversation amongst about 25 people at a time with two instructors where we are having that fluid active conversation where people are are learning about the impact of struggle, learning about the possibilities to grow, learning about what PTG is, where it comes from, what the elements are, and then starting to reflect on their life in that context. And when I said to you earlier that the societal context is so important, people will say to me like, "Oh, it's great. You guys get veterans together." I'm like, "What? Like you get most veterans together, they're going to bitch about civilians in the VA. That's not inherently productive."

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Josh Goldberg: But when you do it in the context of hard things, we're here to talk about wisdom and growth and all of a sudden you get to shape the lens through which people are viewing their experiences, one another, and how that works. And what you will find, and it never ceases to amaze me to sit in a room with people who know each other but don't know each other, who start to reflect and talk about really hard experiences in their life, most of which are personal, not professional, and find great peace in being able to do that and realizing they're not alone, that no one's casting them out of the society or the club because somehow they're so defective as a human being or how could you do that as a parent, a spouse, whatever it is, is you just start to realize like you're a human being. I think what you find is like self-acceptance and a lot of reflection and a lot of wisdom and so that's what we've been up to.

Our retreat centers are beautiful and it's bells and whistles and horses and labyrinths. All these things you go in all you get are some workbooks and two people and a couple of slides and you see that people are ready for this conversation. And as I was saying earlier, the readiness more than anything was, I'm so tired of people telling me that I'm destined to be a victim of this stuff I love this I love this work. And I just need someone to help me find a pathway to not having to choose between my work that I love and my well-being because that's what I feel like is my choice. And if I do this job long enough, my wellbeing is going to suffer enough that my spouse isn't going to talk to me or it's going to divorce me. My kids won't have anything to do with me. I'll retire, be miserable, and then die 5 years later with a drinking problem. And we've got to have a better path than that. And so that's been our focus.

The key focus of struggle was doing it inside of cultures like Tucson Police as an example. You're trying to shift a culture where you're creating a different kind of echo chamber where these concepts are being reinforced consistently because the reality is 80% of our thoughts on a daily basis are negative. Then you add law enforcement going through bad shit. It's natural to see how you get to a bad place and then layer in the diagnosable stuff and all of a sudden someone's just in a black hole of an abyss. And you have to consistently be able to remind yourself like yes this is hard and I can grow in the face of this or grow because of it.

Jon Becker: Well and it's also like nobody teaches us how to regulate our emotions right like this. This is I think theoretically our parents model that not all of us had those parents I certainly didn't. My wife certainly didn't. I think we are those parents for our kids, but that's because we both went through therapy, right? And so I think there is this notion that we should be able to manage ourselves.

When I interviewed Rich, we talked about this idea that you feel like you should intuitively be able to just manage yourself. We have somehow negatively stereotyped and stigmatized mental health and the idea of emotion and management of emotion to a degree that is ridiculous. Every single one of us is emotional. 80% of our thoughts are emotional. We all have never taken the time to go, “Hey, when this happens, here's how you can deal with that. And I think what's interesting to me about Struggle Well is the idea that we're going to take a bunch of grown ass adults and put them in a room and talk through life, but also go like, here's how you help people to work through their emotions. Here's how you work through your emotions. This is what a healthy emotional conversation looks like because I don't know that any of us ever really see that until you're dealing with people that understand what they're doing.

Josh Goldberg: Yeah. There's two thoughts that come to mind. The first is we did a a class for a SWAT team early on because we really wanted to test this with people who kind of have good shit detectors and at the end of this two-day program with the SWAT team, this guy looks at us and he said, "You found our weakness." And I said, "What's that?" and he said, "We'll talk about anything but the shit we haven't figured out." And it was like divorces and custody issues, mostly personal stuff that they were going through. Like four or five guys on the team were going through this out of 28 people, but they would never talk about it with each other because they never wanted them to think they didn't have all their shit squared away.

Jon Becker: Yes.

Josh Goldberg: And it's like, what a toxic thing to do as opposed to leaning into one another and realizing you're not alone, you're not special, and there is support to be gained and wisdom to be gained from this experience. But the other thing I think about is because you're spot on is when we talk about best practices, one of the things we've worked really hard on is, hope isn't a strategy.

So the idea of Post-Traumatic Growth is wonderful, but it's only wonderful if you can bring it to bear in your life. How do you operationalize this in a roadmap that is easy for people to do? It's hard work, but it's easy to understand what you need to do. And that is the process of Struggle Well or Post-Traumatic Growth, which is built in a relational setting. S it's all about trust and connection. It's about being in a place where you feel safe in some way, shape, or form that when you talk about this stuff, it's not being violated. It's not being judged. It's not being sort of taken out of turn and used against you. And that's why the peerbased system is so important to us to go into that. It's also what you do. When you bring in people from one SWAT team to talk to another tactical team who've been through similar shit there's an inherent level of trust in there that you cannot buy, right? That's not easy to acquire or create. And when you have that, you're working through five phases of PTG, which is exactly what Struggle Well is.

First is education. And I talked about this idea of educating people in the normal impact of struggle, but more importantly, educating people about the opportunities to grow in the face of that. The second is regulation. Because it does not matter what you know. If when stuff goes down, your emotions get the best of you or flood you, you cannot apply what you know and do. And any parent who's been tired or just frustrated knows that because the conversation you want to have with your kid, but when you get short and you snap at them and the kid ends up in tears, you realize that your ability to apply what and what you do is limited.

And figuring out what we talk about is how do you create a dimmer switch in your life? When you start to feel yourself rising up, how do you start to bring that down a little bit? Because ultimately we're trying to slow life down like a great operator, like a great athlete. How do you slow it down so you're responding instead of reacting?

Victor Frankle, one of my heroes, wrote “Man Search for Meaning”, the best book ever written. And Frankle said, "In between stimulus and response, there's a space. And in that space is where we get to make choices, conscious choices about who and how we want to be. And when you are really struggling and you're filled to the brim with stress, there's no space. And so you will react. You will say things you didn't want to say. And that will come out when we talk about police who are well will police well. People who have space can effectively adapt to their environment and can deescalate situations. But if you're at a nine and you go into a situation that's hot, that thing's going to 10. Like there's no way you have no capacity to bring it down.

If you can do those two things, then you can start to reflect on, examine, and talk about the hard shit because you're doing it from a place of clarity, from calm, and you can begin to examine and start to make sense of the disorganization that happens to you. And that's like the hard work that we go through in Struggle Well. It's like, okay, why do we have to talk about it? What do we have to talk about? We need to reflect on our childhood. We need to reflect on notions of of self forgiveness, of guilt and shame, of the amazing Cherokee story of the two wolves is one of the challenges in these communities is you have people operating in no margin of error environments and they hold themselves to a standard that is that is otherworldly that is impossible to meet and then you don't do something well and you start to judge yourself and you start to feel shame and you start to withdraw and you start to isolate and start to selfmedicate. Creates these cycles. It's like listen we're not none of us are perfect.

We're made of crooked timber. We have to find ways to acknowledge there are times we feed the bad wolf. When we do that we do certain things and we've got to find some measure of forgiveness for yourself for those experiences or else we will eat ourselves alive like shame will put us into a spiral that we will never get out of and we won't connect to people we won't relate to people we won't seek solace in other people but that's like the hard work.

It's like educate, regulate and disclose. If you do those three things with consistency the story of your life is able to continue to move forward and being willing and able to share that story which is at the heart of what you do is of service is of value because your experience, your suffering, your struggle the lessons you learned will be meaningful to some other human being; which means inherently they're less meaningless to you. Now I went through this because someone else could gain and like that's the simple thing that took us several years to figure out, and then how do you bring it to bear in a way where it lands where people can hear it where it resonates, and then they look at you and are like “I wish I had this ago. So, this needs to go in the academy. What are we doing with retirees? What are we doing with spouses?”

And that's what, Tucson's the gold standard for all that is just having a different conversation with people and reminding them, like you said, like, hey, we're human beings. We learn how to be human from each other. We've got to talk about this stuff and not to pretend like we're robots. We're not affected by this.

We're meant to be affected by life. We're meant to be affected by the birth of our first child and the loss of our parents and everything in between. And how do we allow that to affect us in a way where we feel enriched in the process?

Jon Becker: I think well and come to the realization that the ups and the downs are life.

Josh Goldberg: Correct.

Jon Becker: Right. It's not supposed to be flatlined. It's not supposed to be constantly monotone. It wouldn't be interesting. The highs mean something because of the lows, right? And the lows are what help define us, our ability to overcome those things. I think that's what is so interesting about what you guys are doing is you're arming them ahead of time, so that now when we roll into a situation, you already have the tools, right? We're teaching them how to shoot.

We're teaching them defensive tactics. We're teaching them how to write reports.

We're putting them in these bad situations. And we know we're going to put them in these bad situations because we're teaching them all this for those bad situations. But what we're not doing is taking the time to go, “Hey, when that happens, here's what that's going to feel like and here's what you need and here's the support system that you need to build around you and how you use it”.

I think that's what's really interesting, not only about Struggle Well, but the process, the partnership that you built with Tucson. I'm interviewing Chad, their chief, but like that partnership I think is really interesting from your perspective.

Tell me a little bit about what you guys have done with Tucson.

Josh Goldberg: Yeah. I want to come back to the one thing you. So I got an email recently from a dude at Fargo Police in North Dakota. And we went up there a couple years ago and 6 weeks, 7 weeks after we were up there, there's a guy who went nuts on a traffic stop and shot up a bunch of people. He killed a cop. I shot this guy and this guy was out of work for 18 months. And he said that if he hadn't gone through the struggle while training, he's not sure he would be alive because the tragedy would have killed him. But he said he wore his hat. He got at that training every single day and it reminded him, and his faith reminded him that there was going to be something good to come out of this, and it was his responsibility to honor the brother and partner he lost, not simply mourn and end up in the grave with him. It just reminded me reinforced for me like okay this stuff does work planting some of these seeds that someone can draw upon because your brain can't pull from stuff that doesn't exist in there and so you have to plant those seeds.

The Tucson example which like I said, is the gold standard. Last year we trained 15,000 first responders around the country, primarily law enforcement in 28 states. And this thing has really grown, which just shows you the proliferation and the salience of the concept of PTG and Struggle Well. And we met Chief Kasmmer, we met the Tucson folks, and they were going through difficulty. And there were two ways to describe it. One is they had a couple really significant suicides in the force. There were some cultural challenges post George Floyd, all of those things which we know about. But the other was they had an early intervention program and this is what the guy described. He's like, "So, someone pops hot on this program." And so, the sergeant's meant to talk to him and see what's going on. Is why it seems like his stress levels are elevating, which puts him at risk of internal discipline issues, external complaints, etc. And they call him in the office, be like, "Hey, dude, you good?" And it's like, "Yeah, I'm good."

It's like, "All right, good talk." And then checks it off because they didn't have the capacity to have a conversation.

And so, it's like, "Okay, how do we upskill people where you have that person come in, sit down, and be like, hey, what's going on?" And they're like, "Nothing."

It's like, "No, like what's going on? Like we're not going to leave the office till we talk about what's going on cuz something's going on. And be willing to have that conversation that makes the person feel like they're not being interrogated, but they're being cared for, that someone's concerned about them.

So we started to do work back in ‘21 of these pilots, these 5-day programs. And , people have told, especially mental health folks like, “I just want you to know no one's ever going to say anything”. It's like, okay. I mean, that may be your experience. Not people at TPD, by the way, but it's like that's not been my experience. My experience is people are desperate to put their burdens down.

We started to do it, have these conversations and the intros which are sort of the very first hour started to go longer and longer. One of the questions in the intro is what's one thing you're struggling with and the BS answer is time management, like trying to balance all the things in my life. But people started to go deep early and often and you just started to see this and then there was this process where people would come through, and then they would go home each night start to have conversations with their loved ones that they had never had before about various items and then they would go back and say, “Hey I think you should go to this course”. I think you should go to this course and it started to just have its own momentum and then it got to the place where it was like oh this is amazing.

This needs to be in the academy. This needs to be for the FTOS. This needs to be for the sergeants, the detectives, for the leaders. We need the command staff in here. We need our retirees to have this training. We need our spouses. And it just had this natural momentum that was taking off where it became part of their culture.

One of the things that's always been important to me is that we focus more on what we know than what we do. I don't want to be the guy who comes in and is selling our organization. I want to represent an idea as part of this movement around Post-Traumatic Growth, which is really returning agency and control of people's lives back to them. They're not a victim to a diagnosis or what someone else has said and they can take the pen back and write their own freaking story which isn't what they're being told.

When you walk into the Tucson headquarters and it says, what are you grateful for today? Struggle Well. And they've got Struggle Well posters or signs at the academy. They don't say Boulder Crest on them because I want this to be something that is the culture of Tucson that they own, not something that is being borrowed from us. And that part I take a lot of pride in. We are not about ego and logo. We're about changing perspectives and changing lives and I think the most and it's not just the chief but leadership matters. A lot of leaders outsource mental health to their mental health people. They'll claim they have lots of resources that they don't understand why their people don't use. But the reality is that people want to feel valued.

When chiefs and leaders say they want to take care of their people, the question is are you willing to roll up your sleeves to be a part of that experience? Like because to me leadership is taking care of your people, not outsourcing that role to somebody else and it's knee to knee and it's being there with people. That's what Chad and his entire leadership team embodies and represents and kind of like a Bellich Checkin. Maybe Bell's the wrong example, Andy Reid, maybe the coaching tree is, one of Chad's assistant chiefs is up in Boise and he's bringing it up there. Another guy is in Spokane, he's bringing it there. Start to see how this spreads to other cultures where people realize that if you don't do anything sort of PTSD/victim mentality will spread and is spreading and you've got to counter it in some way and counter the influence of that and if you don't you're going to end up with recruiting issues, retention issues, burnout issues and just people feeling like they're dead man walking and that doesn't behoove anybody.

Jon Becker: It strikes me that you are intentionally setting about to redefine the culture of the organization.

Josh Goldberg: 100%,

Jon Becker: I teach culture-centric leadership. Culture is a topic that I've written on and read on for 20 plus years and it is so much what controls behavior, how you feel about the organization and it is the thing that law enforcement has really let go of. We're promoting the wrong people. We're disciplining the wrong people. Like, we've kind of created this thing where we're undermining the legitimacy of the culture. We're undermining the trust in the organization. We're undermining people's ability to communicate with one another. And so, there isn't a tribe for them to be a member of. And this goes in and redefineses the culture and reconnects the people, which I think is fantastic.

Josh Goldberg: That it's so interesting that you raised that because certainly I think that's the primary objective, right? And you have to do that with the leadership, not like the leadership or just with a permissive kind of allowance.

One of the things that I think about like when we do this 5day Struggle Well program, the last day is breakouts. We asked them to reflect on a few questions.

One is what resonated with you this week that you can bring to bear in your life and in your work. Second, what support do you need to do that? And the third is what does the culture need to do to be more aligned with these notions and ideas?

And they come in and they present. And early on, Tucson brought in a senior leader. Happens all over the country. Bring in a senior leader from the agency to listen to just listen to what the people say.

One of the biggest challenges in the culture is not just disconnection or lack of trust, which is big, but it's also this us-them bullshit mentality.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Josh Goldberg: Which is like we're victims to the administration that doesn't understand it and say, "Okay, but how do you reinvigorate people's sense that they do have agency and some level of control?" You listen to people. And it doesn't mean you do everything they ask you to do. But like early on, you started to see people come in and share these ideas in this breakout. And a senior leader is listening and be like, "Listen, these are things I'm going to take away because I need to reflect on and look at. These are things we can do right now. Like you want to wear pins on your uniform and Struggle Well awesome. Approved. Got it done. You want tactical hats that you can use on-- we got it. And then these are things I can't do but here's why.

And all of a sudden you start to create this culture where people come back to life as adults and realize that if they don't help shape the culture, the culture is going to shape them, and it's going to have its own sort of nihilistic way of operating where it's just more negativity feeding negativity. That piece to me of creating a culture where there's ownership and where people are bought in is so important. And it's what rebuilt trust. I mean, like I said, Kasmar is a great leader, came in, trust wasn't that high in any agency. And it's like, how do you rebuild it?

Ask people and tell them, "We have an issue. How do we address it?" And listen to them. And when you start to do that, you start to rebuild their sense that they're cared for, they're listened to, they're valued, and that they have a vote.

And I think that's been an essential part of this journey.

And when I think about culture, the greatest story of PTG in the world is the Prisoners of War from the Hanoi Hilton. And in that spirit, the greatest leader who was a leader in the Hanoi Hilton, these guys were in prison for 2 and a half months, almost 9 years. They were, , captivity, tortured, James Stockdale.

Amazing, right? Focused on building a culture where people felt they had a sense of agency that they were still led. He was still in charge, but he created this culture where people realized that they weren't victims. We talk about this idea like we're not in the prison isn't here on our forehead. And these ideas, I think for me, is taking the lessons that they taught us and bringing it to bear is a big part of what I think we're doing, which is why it's so appropriate for the warrior culture.

The warrior culture is a culture that understands that hard things have value, understands that human beings are incredibly malleable. And it's like, “Okay, cool. Let's just train you to do these things. And if you're trained to do these things, you'll be good at doing them. And keep working from there and share what you learn.”

Jon Becker: Where could people learn more about Struggle Well?

Josh Goldberg: So our website has a lot of resources on it, a lot of videos. So, I'd say go to Bordercrest.org or Struggle.org, which will take you to the same kind of pages. And there's a whole bunch of content we put up there to be we call just the home of Post-Traumatic Growth where we've got a lot of content on there.

There's also a book we wrote called Struggle Well, which is an audio book and paperback versions. And if they want to bring us to bear at their agency, you can email StrugglewellBoulderCrest.org. and we continue to work with philanthropy and others to be able to bring this to as many people as we can and and change lives, change cultures, change organizations and make sure that people can live great lives.

For me I said as a civilian I don't want to be part of a world or I won't be part of a world where we ask people to do great-great things and difficult things and that the cost of that service is the quality of their life. Like it just doesn't work for me.

So our organization exists to make sure that people can live great lives in the face of stress, struggle, hardship, and trauma. And that's what we get to do. So if we can be part of that journey for people on an individual basis, organizational basis, we're here to support.

Jon Becker: Well, I think that is one of the things that's most unique about you, right? Like there are a lot of people in this space who are for-profit organizations that are out trying to make money on others' pain. I think one of the reasons I wanted to sit down with you is this notion that like this is a foundation, right? It's not a for-profit business. It's a foundation. You are providing these services because people are donating money. You're finding philanthropy. You're doing this for the community to help the community, not to get rich off the community.

Josh Goldberg: In the heyday of Defund the Police and things along those lines where cops are so unaccustomed to people doing things without strings attached.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Josh Goldberg: And we've got amazing donors. I mean, Gary Senise Foundation, I mean, Gary's one of the best human beings alive. Calls himself a grateful American. He doesn't want anything other than literally he'll send a message like, "Go help people." That's what he wants us to do. And doesn't want anything from anybody. Doesn't need recognition. Doesn't need a name check.

The folks at FirstNets and others we have there are folks in the world who are incredibly grateful. Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank, who are genuinely grateful to live in a country where people are willing to do what folks on the first responder side and the military side do. And they want to make sure that those folks have the same opportunities that they do to live a good life and a peaceful life and have a wonderful family and all those good things. And it does make life a lot easier because it's like, “No like we're literally just here to help|. And yes, we got people we got to pay and the rest of it we got to, but it's like we're just here to help and that's it. I'll spin around. There's no string.

For me personally, when I went through a deep struggle in my life, I randomly crossed paths with members of the veteran first responder communities who saw something in me and helped me in their language “unfuck” myself; which is the first time I heard the term, but I'm grateful I did. And I wouldn't be alive if I hadn't met the members of these communities. So I owe a debt of gratitude to the members of these communities who taught me much of what I understand about strength and courage and what it means to be a man and a good human being.

And that's the best part of my life is every day I feel like I get held accountable to being authentic and to being the best version of myself because I have role models who have taught me that and the role models are from these communities.

So my version of my life on a personal basis is like if I can ensure that members of these communities live great lives, they'll have the same effect on people like me that they had on me. And that's what'll change the world. One person at a time with people who are powerhouses who when they're struggling are radioactive and who when they're well can fucking lead movements and move mountains.

Jon Becker: Keep doing what you're doing, man. You guys are making a difference.

Josh Goldberg: Appreciate Jon. Thank you.

Jon Becker: Finally, I'm joined by Chief Chad Kasmar, who has led the Tucson Police Department since 2021. A Tucson native with a University of Arizona degree, Chief Kasmar brings over 20 years of multi-dimensional experience across key operational units, including the hostage crisis team, street crime interdiction, and internal affairs. His leadership portfolio includes successful transformation of the city's public safety communications department, where he consolidated police and fire 911 operations while improving staffing capabilities.

Now overseeing five interconnected bureaus, Chief Kasmar integrates Harvard executive training with frontline experience to create a supportive framework for his team while pushing for operational accidents. I first met Chief Kasmar while working with his SWAT team who strongly emphasized how effective the department's wellness programs created in conjunction with Boulder Crest have been. Under his guidance, the department has implemented a holistic approach that is building a much better environment and a much more resilient team.

Chief, thanks for being here with me.

Chad Kasmar: Thanks for having me.

Jon Becker: So, I wanted to talk to you because I've talked to the guys from Boulder Crest. I've talked to Rich. I understand the theory, but Tucson PD has kind of become what they're describing as the gold standard for the implementation of this. And so I really kind of want to understand what started you down the road to, “I need to change the culture of my police department”.

Chad Kasmar: Well, that's a great question. I had time to reflect about my profession when I left it and in 2020 I hit my 20 years in the department. I'd lost my dad. I'll talk about that relevancy later. But I had made the decision I was either going to be moving. I had been the second in command for about 6 years and I just knew I had outgrown that position and I was ready to do something different whether it was become the chief of police, become a director somewhere else in the city or just do something completely different outside of law enforcement. It was a tough last 5 years of my career. We went through George Floyd and we went through a lot of different things within the organization. The change agent chief changed all of our policy use of force. It was a very difficult time for the organization. And then I had the opportunity in 2020 to leave the department and go to the public safety communications department, basically the comm director there.

And it was that year that I was away in 2021 where two members died by suicide. Steven Cass was a young three three-year veteran patrol veteran, wellliked, big kid. had some stuff going on in his personal life. Also was exposed to trauma at work. Was involved in an officer involved shooting where he didn't shoot, but he was shot at. He was right there. Thought he had been hit. Lots of trauma exposure. undiagnosed, unpacked. Didn't come and didn't reach out to our department resources. And then shortly after his death, and you notice I said “died by suicide”. That he didn't commit suicide. That's intentional. And then a few months later, again, while I was still gone, a female sergeant named Amanda Voss, well-respected 15-year veteran, two children, ex-husband on the department, brother on the SWAT team, really well-respected me cop, dies by suicide, and come to find out she had been really struggling with alcohol. And again, lots of trauma, exposure to traffic investigations, DUIs, deaths, fatalities, and both of their rucks sacks were full.

So what I had time to think about while I was away was there's too much trauma exposure in this town. People think of Tucson as this sleepy old pueblo if you're if you're born and raised there. But I am third generation raising fourth. The reality is it's the 33rd largest city in the country. We're a border city. We're an hour away from the border. 250 geographic square miles. Tons of fentanyl. 50% of the fentanyl in this country is in our state. I mean you name it, gun violence, traffic fatalities, crime, short staffing, low morale, poor equipment. I mean, when I came back to the department, we had 200 Crown Victoria still 4 years ago. We still have 100 today.

All the challenges that any police department in America can face, we were facing.

And so what I recognized was like, “Man, if I ever got the opportunity to go back and be the chief of my department…”. We have a great department, department psychologist, well respected, who had been there for over a decade to behavioral scientist sergeants who would back her up on officer involved shootings, critical incidents, but one weekend of resumeumés were like reading a war novel. I mean, I would read every time an officer does proactive work or felony arrest or something that's worthy of media attention, they complete a resume. And what caught me was I would read these things and we're deploying Ifat kits, tourniquets, check sucking chest wounds, rushing people to the yard, our own vehicles, treating our own injured police officers, assaults, shootings.

Last year we had 175 non-fatal skin piercing shootings on top of 64 homicides on top of 400 shootings where skin wasn't contacted. That's just under two shootings a day in town. I mean, that's a war zone. It's crazy. So what I recognized was when I came back, I needed to restructure. I needed to make an investment in wellness. But what I also knew is there were certain things that I had within my knowledge and skill set to do as I developed a new team. But I also needed a partner. That's where my relationship really blossomed with Boulder Crest and the Struggle Well Warrior Path programs.

Jon Becker: How did you find Boulder Crest?

Chad Kasmar: I have to give credit to Captain Flores at the Tucson Police Department who's a dual serving member. He's in the guard. He's also one of our members and he had worked with the previous leadership team to onboard the first Struggle Well class which was in December of 2021 which was the month that I took over as chief of police. So I inherited this first program. It took about 6 months to figure out what that would look like for the former leadership team at the time to be willing to bring this partner in.

And once I got a hold of what the content was, what it was about, and heard the feedback from the staff, I quickly went back to the Boulder Crest leadership team and said, "How do we do one of these a month?" And the premise around it is it's a voluntary class. The foundation of his Post-Traumatic Growth and its word of mouth. We and to this day, four years later, it is not a mandated class. We don't force people to go. It's really driven at a peer level. It started with just our line operational staff. It didn't include supervisors. It didn't include lieutenants, captains, assistant chiefs. We didn't participate in it necessarily as a leadership team. And it just slowly progressed. And the beauty of the class is it starts with 25 strangers because we're, we're we're in the we're considered a major city police department.

We're in the larger scale police departments have about 1,200 team members and about 800 commissions. But when we think about trauma exposure within a police organization, you have to recognize that record staff now watches realtime body camera footage of our officer involved shootings of traffic fatalities of all the ugly stuff we see out in the field. Your 911 call takers, your dispatchers, your EMTs, your firefighters. We're all exposed. Anybody part of the public safety team is exposed to trauma that the normal citizen or normal community member can just not fathom. And what happens is rucks sacks get full. And we generally, those of us who have been doing this for two, two and a half decades, we grew up in a culture where big boys, big girls don't cry. Go to the call, take the call, suck it up, do your report, go take the next call. We didn't have mental health resources.

We didn't talk about trauma exposure. We didn't talk about ruck sacks being full.

It wasn't safe to do that. What we take is a group of strangers who are terrified to be there. Not so much anymore, but man, I'll tell you, in year 1 and year two, when the classes opened and I now opened those classes, there were a lot of blank faces. A lot of folks didn't want to make eye contact, a lot of apprehension about being in those classes. That's dissipated over time as people, that's become a culture shift and not just a class we take, but a shifting culture that's changed.

But I remember in the early classes, I would go in and I would open those up. So to see the class where they start on day one of that journey and then through the content that they learn and the connections that they make and the reflections that they have and the in their last day culminates with the deputy chief, the second in command of my organization and the assistant chief's going to hear from the class on what they learned and what they think we can do better as an organization and how we enrich in our lives through Post-Traumatic Growth learning.

Jon Becker: I found out about this like we are in touch because your SWAT team.

Chad Kasmar: Yes.

Jon Becker: Pulled me aside and said, "Oh my god, you have to see what our chief did." Which means I'm used to the conversation, you have to see what our chief did. I don't ever remember it ending positively. It was interesting to see at a cultural level in the organization when I went in to train the team what their mindset towards you, towards the leadership team, towards the program was like it was very clear that you had shifted the culture of the organization which is really unusual in modern law enforcement.

Chad Kasmar: It is and I won't take credit for that. I mean I found the right partners. I put together the right leadership team. Some of those decisions were difficult to make where I needed the right people in the right seats to help lead this effort. I think when I look at it, the leadership team that started this in 2021 and evolved into 2022 really created the space in this department. The crisis that we were living in created the opportunity for people to think differently about it.

And there's a lot of great lines and parts of the book and the Struggle Well book, but one of them is that “Struggle is inevitable. It's not personal”, right? We all struggle.

I think, if you look at your social media, nobody's struggling on social media. That somebody has more money, they're better looking, they're sleeping better, they're eating better, they have less body fat, their kids are prettier. I mean, we live in this world where everything's reinforced that you're less than and man, like who do you confide in and who are your three to five? What I love about the program, it's a common sense approach to laying out that and I and I started and I'll tell you when the team came to me and they said part of it is disclosure, is disclosing, sharing your struggles, your experiences so that you can enrich in other people's lives and normalize that struggle. Then they said, "Chief, not only do we want you to open because you'll set the stage, but are you willing to disclose? And it is because if we think you disclose, instead of having disclosure on Thursday afternoon into Friday, we could shore this up on Tuesday, Wednesday.”

And I thought, "Okay, let me get this straight. You want me to stand in front of a a group of team members, Tucson Police, Tucson Fire, Tucson Comm, maybe some guests because we bring in guests from other parts of the country that can-other chiefs, other police leaders, other department psychologist so they can see how our class is working and you want me to talk about the challenges in my life.”

I have had plenty.

I talk either about my mother and her two sisters and two brothers all being sexually abused by their father and how that's resulted in unprocessed trauma that my mom's lived with her whole life. I talk about my little brother's addiction to opiates and how he lives in recovery and I worry about that all the time or my little sister's eating disorder. But the one that normally gets me is I tell the story about my father and losing my father to heart disease. In a short period of time back in 2018. At the time by all accounts my life was perfect. I had an amazing wife and best friend who I still have today which is unusual in our field right. She is obviously the lead point in my 3 to five. I have two amazing kids. I was second in command. Again a difficult job but being a he was pretty young in that position and well respected. I tried to buffer the organization as much as possible to achieve the chief's direction, but also think about how that would impact our people.

I'll tell you what life taught me in 2018 when my dad got pneumonia which attacked his heart and he went from a healthy 72-year-old to dying in front of me in the hospital with his family by his side in a short period of weeks was you're not in control of your life. Right? So I'd process all these things and I've had all the regular things happen at work. We've lost officers. I've lost peers. I've had children die in my arms. Don't have a heart attack in front of me tonight, Jon, because I'm like 0 for six. You're going to die if you have a heart attack.

Jon Becker: Okay. Well, that's good to know. I was planning but I'm going to skip it.

Chad Kasmar: I picked the right side of that of the training academy. I've had all the same trauma exposures that everybody else has, but I had dealt with those in a way in my life where I didn't. I didn't really struggle with those experiences because I shared those with my friends. I didn't internalize those things. But when my dad died, man, it was this like “What are you doing with your life?” And I almost didn't go back to work as a deputy chief.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Chad Kasmar: And it just didn't matter as much anymore. And so what that loss taught me was through my father's loss, it's really enriched my life in the way that I look at it. And that's where a lot of the Struggle Well concepts come into play. So I share that story and I'll tell you we've had 40 classes. We do one a month. We're into year four. They're going to keep going until we get everybody trained and even then we'll have to continue to do maintenance training and we can talk about other classes we do with Struggle Well content as well. I've not gotten through one of those Mondays where I open up without getting choked up and having to compose myself.

I always wonder and I joke with the team, because it's uncomfortable for them to see the chief of police.

Jon Becker: Nobody wants to see dad cry.

Chad Kasmar: No. And I certainly taught my boys how to do that when my dad passed away. But I'll tell you, it's the most difficult Monday I have. And all my Mondays are difficult, but it's the most meaningful because what happens is every class I get feedback that if the chief of police, the leader of our organization, can stand up and share his challenges and normalize the struggle, well then hell, I'm going to share too. And it happens every time. I'm a morning guy. I'm up typically at 4:30/5:00 in the morning and I look forward to every day I go to work to this day and man, I walk out of there whipped. It's about a 45 minute conversation that I have with the folks.

I'll go back to the reason it resonates is that we are unpacking years of unprocessed trauma. We've deferred maintenance on our house for a long time.

And I'm fortunate that I found a partner that had the expertise. I knew enough to know I'm a creative problem solver, but I'm a cop. And I don't know enough about how to unpack all of my staff's experiences. And it was so critical because early in ‘22 just when we had restructured the department. I created a wellness division. I invested resources. I restructured the command. I made sure that wellness was right in the same bureau in our same executive bureau, internal affairs, and the PIO and all those critical things that report up to a chief but also wellness reports now up through the second in command to the chief of police. I put all those things in place, but it takes time. Culture shift takes time.

Within that I lost another friend to suicide in 2022, Chris Fidolio, who was a wellrespected Kanan officer who had to medically retire because he his rucks sack got full. We didn't know what Post-Traumatic Growth was back then. And he became addicted to Nyquil. And we worried about Chris when he separated from the department. He had been involved in numerous officer-involved shootings.

He had his K-9 partner killed. He was involved in a fatal car collision. I mean, you name it, this this this guy was out there. He was a cop and he was exposed to untold traumas and his rucks sack got full and we just we couldn't help him and we didn't have the skills and the resources that we have now. We didn't have the culture and so he suffered silently which caused a struggled marriage and it caused him to medically retire. Well, in his afterlife, he became a security guard, in a security guard type function with a couple other TBD folks. And one day, his ruck sack got too full and he took his own life, at this other job in front of two of his retirees.

Jon Becker: Jesus.

Chad Kasmar: And at first, we actually thought it was an active killer type situation. I responded to that scene. I was eating dinner with my wife and my youngest son when that happened and I responded out there and I remember kneeling by Chris and just making a promise to him that whose kids and wife I grew up with that we had failed him, but we wouldn't fail anyone else. In four years, we've had 10 individuals, just under 10 individuals come forward with different levels of crisis. One who had an active plan and was on their way to take their own life, but stopped and called us. And all 10 of those individuals are stabilized and they're back to work, and that's the best thing that I can do for Chris's wife, Bren, and his two children that he left behind.

You notice again that I said died by suicide, didn't commit suicide. This is not suicide prevention training. And I open every class with that. That's too low of a bar. I used to talk a lot about resiliency till Josh beat that out of me, too. It's too low of a bar. There's too much trauma exposure and struggle is inevitable and you're going to have your rough days whether it's a difficult call for service or I disappoint you with some kind of chief organizational change you don't understand which I had to do last year to make organizational changes to address a level of violence we were facing or you don't get a promotion, or you name it right, infidelity, marital challenges, all these things happen to you. I would say we've done a great job but there is no destination to culture shift when it comes to mental health and wellness of public safety folks because the challenges are going to continue to change. We have to recognize that we've underinvested in this space for so long it's going to take us a long time to catch up.

So, what I would encourage anybody who's listening is, if you have a chief or you have leadership that you don't think would be open to bringing a Post-Traumatic Growth program, and it doesn't necessarily have to be Struggle Well or Boulder Crest, you can find another partner. That's the partner that worked out well for us and I inherited and and I'm blessed to have, but there are other folks in the space who do this training. You can still pull together regional training efforts, right? It's still high quality training that can impact and change and shape lives.

True culture shift can only happen though when you have an organization from the top down that's ready to rethink the way that we do work, rethink the way that we apply discipline, rethink the way that we treat people who are in crisis.

You don't have to have a department psychologist and a wellness division to make all this work. But you do have to have a commitment that when folks make missteps or when there's undesired outcomes as a chief, as a leader, you have to think about why did that happen? What's driving behavior and recognizing we employ human beings. And so, as a chief, it also comes from me putting my job on the line. So, when a team member makes a mistake, I'm not in the media selling them down the river because I'm under some political pressure along with my elected officials and mayor and counsel.

I often say, I couldn't have done this without city leadership first in financially investing and creating space and trust that I could launch a program like this and it would be beneficial to the organization as a whole, not just the police department but the city of Tucson.

So here we are 4 years later and we have a lot of work to do. I'll focus on the key concepts that obviously the foundation is Post-Traumatic Growth, but it's a pyramid around physical wellness, mental wellness, financial wellness. We all know cops love our toys and that's one of the ways we're going to cope. And in the middle so again physical, financial, mental and in the middle of that triangle is spiritual. Spiritual not in who your god is, but what is your sense of purpose?

When we get desensitized because we don't unpack the trauma that we're exposed to we don't see humans as humans.

I love talking to anti- police groups and defunding movement groups and I tell them like ”The only thing I know that we do better of and we do less of it is lose weight, but if you want to cut my budget or that's not going to result in my lack of ability to invest in my team members so that I can unpack the experiences that they have. That's how we're going to result in better community service.”

The cool part is my primary focus with Post-Traumatic Growth and Struggle Well was not to enhance service delivery. That was far from it. It was really to take ownership of and I say this to every class. “I'm sorry you've not been invested in”. And I have to say that less now because that was what I said four years ago and now we've done a really good job of it. But in those early classes I said, “Hey we failed you. We failed to give you the tools.” And I took ownership as a chief because I contributed those even as a second in command. We had some highprofile terminations that were tough. That was the decision the chief had to make at the time, but now I'm the chief and I get to make those decisions.

We've had some really difficult use-of-force cases. If you do a quick Google of us, you're not going to find any salacious terminations, where I was where I was selling the staff down the river. And that's the evolution of the profession. In a world where major city chiefs have a two and a half, three-year lifespan, it's a difficult thing. We're asking everybody to balance. We're asking historically hardened police officers who haven't been invested in, who haven't had their rucksacks unpacked to now come in and feel safe and to share their feelings.

That's a difficult thing to do and I think that we have to recognize that. And so, in my organization, it works well that I get to open up those classes and set that example, take some ownership of things that haven't gone the way that they probably should have. And tell them like, “Hey, we're all human and we're going to figure this out together”. And that's really what's shifted culture at the Tucson Police Department.

Jon Becker: What I love about this is there's so much talk about brotherhood.

There's so much talk about police officers being out there doing the right things.

But we've created an environment where we're no longer able to talk to each other because if you tell me something bad, well, I've got to do something about it. And so many chiefs feel obligated like, "Oh, this guy's fucked up. I've got to get him out of my organization. I'm not going to try to heal him." So there's an incentive on the part of the staff to hide what's actually wrong and although there is talk about brotherhood, there isn't a culture of support and it all starts with leadership, it starts and ends with leadership.

I've said for years like part of the problem we have right now is we are promoting leaders who have never made a mistake in their career, and when they do make a mistake we get rid of. Right? We've got this mindset of, “Well, Chad screwed that up, so we got to move him out of the organization”, or “We're not going to promote that guy because, well, he worked narcotics and he shot somebody”. And it is absolutely moronic to think that like you and I are both at an age where it's like, I've made a fuck ton of mistakes.

Chad Kasmar: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Right. And now as a business leader, I am so much better at this than I was 25 years ago because I've tripped and fallen on my face so many times.

So the idea we're going to promote you when you haven't made mistakes is the idea that we're going to promote you when you don't have the skills to actually lead.

Chad Kasmar: I would encourage part of that is having a discipline guide that dissects mistakes versus misconducts. Here's another conversation I love to have with defunders or folks to educate them about our profession. 10 years post Ferguson tell me how our training curriculum across this country has changed.

Jon Becker: It's been defunded.

Chad Kasmar: It's been defunded. Or let me answer the other way too. It hasn't been enhanced. It's still--

Jon Becker: It's gotten worse.

Chad Kasmar: It's still 9 months of training, in 9 months of training we take it if we're talking about males, which predominantly our workforce is made up of, right? And their brain, we know based upon science that their brain is not fully developed for the next 5 to 6 years after we hire them.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Chad Kasmar: I'll tell you another little tidbit. Most of them don't go out and get their driver's licenses when they turn 16. Now it's 18, 19, 20. So we teach them to drive.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jon Becker: We teach them, we teach them defensive tactics. We teach them case law. We teach them constitutional law, city codes, deescalation, all these cultural competency, all these different things in 9 months. And then we give them a gun and a badge and a camera and responsibility. And we say, "Hey, go out there. Good luck. Don't make any mistakes.”

Jon Becker: “Because if you do, we're going to charge you with a crime and we're going to throw you under the bus."

Chad Kasmar: Which happens, right? Which happens. And so what I tell people is when this world is designed around Navy Seal teams are probably the best trained in conjunction with our SWAT operators who don't get to train as much as Navy Seals if they're not a full-time SWAT team. But let's use Navy Seals, NBA, NFL professional athletes. They're training at least 95% of the time and deploying 5% of the time. Most cops in America, including my department, are deploying 95% of the time and training 5% of the time. I sit here today with a workforce that 40% of them have less than 5 years on.

Now crisis or opportunity maybe a little bit of both but they're more moldable.

So, the cool part is through the feedback of our senior members of man, great training. I've heard everything from good training, lifechanging. Cops hate two things, right, yeah the way it is and change not one person has said this was a waste of my time this week. Not one. Not with over almost.

Jon Becker: That's a miracle.

Chad Kasmar: That in itself is a miracle because a healthy cop is a complaining cop, right?

Jon Becker: 100%.

Chad Kasmar: And so when we look at these things, we have to recognize, man, we're such an underinvested profession because you can't go install a water heater or an air conditioning unit or electric in a house without 2 to four years of mentorship and training. So, why is it in this country that you can't do anything with a two-year associates degree in this country that's going to make a living, right? And you struggle with a four-year. I was at a class the other day around MLK day, a community conversation, and I said and I said, "You know what's interesting? Everybody who spoke before me today had the word doctor in front of them except me. Mine was chief. The rest were doctors." I said, 'You are the one of the most highly educated groups I've ever spoken with to a committee group. I said, 'We should think about the fact that you've all been and had 6 to 8 years of education and my officers have 9 months and look at the expectations and none of you are wearing cameras today”. We have to think about it--

Jon Becker: Well and take it one step further. Doctors practice.

Chad Kasmar: Yeah, trust me.

Jon Becker: Doctors practice this is one that is always a point of rage for me.

Like doctors kill way more people than cops do every year. Well, me and we go, "Oh, well, I mean, he's practicing."

Chad Kasmar: My dad's doctor didn't have a camera on the day my dad died.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Chad Kasmar: I use that analogy. So, I just shine light to our profession that I'm so proud of. It's always been noble. That's what's drawn me back. I don't have to do this. I have other interests. any effective chief has to be able to retire the day they take the job on. And I'm going into my fourth year. I have a lot of support.

There's a three-legged stool for chiefs, community, city leadership, and your team. And if you lose any one of those, you're not effective in the role. And I think we're trying to balance that. I'm not a perfect chief. We're not a perfect organization. In fact, my staff, we're probably the poorest major city police department in America, worst funded. We have a poor community. We have some struggles. We actually have a sales tax vote tonight that's being defined tonight that will define our future and a lot riding on that. But my team, I'm so proud of my team. They have every reason to be disgruntled, to be angry, short staff. They don't have the best equipment. We ask a lot from them. High levels of violence. I ask them to continue to be a learning organization and malleable to change because that's the new world order, right? We have to try different things, evaluate whether they're working or not, and adapt. And that's not easy to do. No human being likes change and including our profession. And I couldn't be more proud of the way that the team continues to respond. But they respond largely because we've made an investment in them. And that's what Post-Traumatic Growth is about. That's what Struggle Well is about. That's what the culture shift is about.

Jon Becker: If you were speaking, I mean, and I know that you're doing this, but if I'm a chief of police and I'm listening to this, what's Chad's like, here's where I would start if I were you. Like your lessons learned from implementing this program?

Chad Kasmar: Yeah. You need to learn to struggle well first, right? The chiefs do.

Um, pick up the book, pick up learn, educate yourself about Post-Traumatic Growth. Um, again, it doesn't have to be the Boulder Crest pathway, but start reading and educating yourselves about it. Your staff with the amount of overtime, the amount of exposure. There's no department in America that doesn't need enhanced mental health support and services.

We have to move away from this idea that why is it if you're on the SWAT team or you're out on patrol and you pull your hamstring on duty, we might have to put you on the desk for a week. You might have to go back to the city doctor to get you stretched out or we're going to do very systematic things to get you back to work. Why do we still have this stigma that if you injure your brain you're exposed? It can be an isolated incident or it can be cumulative, right?

Exposure. We don't know how we're going to respond or when it's going to trigger that response. But every police leader in America, every fire chief, every comm director has to start thinking about how are you investing the skills and the tools when we have these setbacks. Your team members have the resources they need to be successful and to navigate those things. It just makes the struggle more manageable. We're not there's no panacea. And this again, let me just say it one more time.

One of my worst fears and we do a lot of things to reinforce this is you cannot go to this class and be inspired this week and walk away and not pick up the practices anymore or it won't work. They won't work. It's just like having a healthy diet. It's like any goal that you set takes continuous work and improvement. But the cool part about it is the program also recognizes we're human and we're going to fail. So, if you eat like shit today or you have a bad day today, you're a jerk to your wife, you're a jerk to your husband, you're a jerk to your kids, you just weren't in the right mindset for your shift at work, and you get a complaint, tomorrow's another day. You compartmentalize, you evaluate, you go back to your studies, you go back to your triangle, you go back to your goal setting, you go back to your 3 to five, you go back to your disclosure, so you don't keep that in your rucksack.

The best thing that I like about the program as well is you form a reputation so fast in this culture, in the policing culture, and I suspect it's the same way for a firehouse where you're living with people. And it's certainly, I can tell you, maybe even worse in a comm shop where there's no windows and they're together 12 hours a day, right? And there's no closure there because everything they're doing is through the phone. And I think that sometimes it is even worse.

When we think about our jobs and we think about what we signed up to do and the mission of all of our organizations, what the last 10 years has shown us and the and the data on the officer memorial down page shows it is we're not doing enough.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Chad Kasmar: It's still the number one killer of police officers is suicide.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Chad Kasmar: And that's mental health. Every chief to to put a bow on your question has a responsibility to figure out what unique way they're going to do that within their organizations. It doesn't matter how small. It doesn't matter how big. Every chief in America has a responsibility. And I'll tell you, I'll give you I'll give you listeners hope.The group of chiefs that sit around major city today is very different than it was a decade ago. And I've been going to that conference for 10 years. The same thing holds true for the Arizona Chiefs of Police Association. So most of the police leaders that I interact with at this point of our profession see a deep calling to invest in our profession and get it to where it needs to be at the end of their careers. They don't have to be doing these jobs.

They saw it not work the last 5 to 10 years. And nobody wants to walk away from the profession feeling like we got kicked to the corner and there's no recognition or appreciation for the sacrifices that all of our public safety team members make.

I hope that gives some hope to listeners to your podcast who are going, "Man, I just don't see it in my chief." Okay. Well, just like I talked to an officer today.

You're a senior officer. I don't want to hear out of your mouth that you don't have influence in your department. You have just as much influence as I do as a chief of police. And so, you have to think about that. How do your senior officers expose them to a program like this? They're going to help you scale that program.

You don't have to drive it as a chief. Your senior well-respected officers.

I had a 33-year officer, patrol officer, which is really an outlier in today's world of policing. He spent 33 years on the south side of Tucson serving a specific community, one of the most violent parts of town. Grew up there, served there.

His daughter just got hired. He just retired. We were at his ceremony this last Saturday and a retired detective came up to me and he said, "What you've all done in the Struggle Well Warrior Path program saved my life." He said, "I lost myself. I was coping with alcohol. My marriage was falling apart. I looked in the mirror. I didn't know who I was anymore." And he was ready to die by suicide. In fact, he told his wife when he packed his bag to go down to the Warrior Path Experience. He said, "If this doesn't help me," he goes, "There's nothing that can help me, and I don't think I can live anymore." It was a combination of things we had done at work, presetting him with a Struggle Well content and then the Warrior Path and it clicked and he's been sober for 3 years.

He's healthy. He's happy. He's with his daughter. When I saw him Saturday, the marriage was back intact. So, I'll close with, you can redefine your future, right?

Your past doesn't dictate what your future holds. And in a culture where we're often defined by a reputation that we create in an academy setting, every day is an opportunity to define who you are and to and to level set and set goals.

Post-Traumatic Stress disorder is not a jail sentence for public safety who choose to risk their lives and expose themselves to traumas. Post-Traumatic Growth provides a pathway to enrich your life based upon those traumatic exposures; whether they're in your personal life or whether they're in your professional life.

Jon Becker: Chief, thanks so much for sitting down with me. This was amazing.

Chad Kasmar: Thanks for having me.

Jon Becker: One of the unintended consequences of hosting The Debrief is that I'm constantly immersed in trauma and the lasting effects it has on responders, victims, and their families. This is an area where it is clear that we can do better.

The wreckage we are leaving our warriors and first responder with after they sacrifice themselves is just unacceptable.

When police officers are more likely to kill themselves than be killed in the line of duty, we are doing something wrong. Hopefully, today's discussion has lit a fire for you to take a deeper dive into this area. We've included a number of resources in the show notes.

If you are struggling with PTSD, please know that there is a path out of the darkness. Whatever your source of trauma, there are treatment methods that work and will allow you to emerge stronger than you were before.

Please seek help because you deserve to be happy.