Today, Courtney Mulhern interviews Dan Joseph, Author of the Combat Psych website and the book Backpack to Rucksack: Insight Into Leadership and Resilience From Military Experts.
His articles and tools are to help soldiers and families build mental fitness and overcome past trauma so that they can live healthier / happier lives.
As you know from Courtney Mulhern's episode, she is a practicing therapist and a terrific interviewer, so I put the two together for this episode.
Dan Joseph's info:
https://combatpsych.com
"Backpack to Rucksack: Insight Into Leadership and Resilience From Military Experts":
https://www.amazon.com/Backpack-Rucksack-Leadership-Resilience-Military
Website "Combat Psych" where you can find more information about him and the things he's working on: https://www.combatpsych.com
Instagram: @mhen2.mentalhealth
One CA is a product of the civil affairs association
and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of US foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail dot com
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
Special Thanks to Amr Diab for the song and album "Amarain."
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6RC2T3Q7rs
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Transcript for episode I&II
00:00:00 Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. Contact the show. Email us at [email protected]. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org. I'll have those in the show notes. Okay, testing.
00:00:37 COURTNEY MULHURN
Can you hear me, Dan?
00:00:38 DANNY JOSEPH
Yes, loud and clear. Today, Courtney Mulhern interviews Dan Joseph, author of the Combat Psych website and the book Backpack to Rucksack, Insight into Leadership and Resilience for Military Experts. His articles and tools are to help soldiers and their families build mental fitness and overcome past trauma so that they can live healthier, happier lives. As you know from Courtney Mulhern's episode, she's a practicing therapist and a terrific interviewer. So I put the two together for this episode. This is part one of two. I'll have a link to his site in the show notes. So back to Courtney.
00:01:14 COURTNEY MULHURN
Hi, Dan, and welcome to the 1CA podcast.
00:01:17 DANNY JOSEPH
Thanks for having me. Yes,
00:01:18 COURTNEY MULHURN
we've got a lot to talk about today. Looks like you've been very busy with several books out now and still more coming. So I want to talk to you about all of that. But before we get into that, I just want to hear a little bit about your military service.
00:01:33 DANNY JOSEPH
Yeah, I was a combat engineer, training folks to go deploy, and was a platoon leader. Got to spend a lot of time with the Joes out in the field. And it was a short contract. I was only in for three and a half years. And I'm out now, but definitely I'm looking at rejoining in other capacities.
00:01:53 COURTNEY MULHURN
Okay. So kind of moving into your writing process, just kind of curious how you got into writing.
00:02:01 DANNY JOSEPH
So the main crux of it was getting out of the military, trying to fit in society and realizing I was totally different. I changed in a big way that I didn't expect. It was quite subtle, to be honest. And I joined old. I joined at 32. So a lot of my buddies were 18, 19 when I met them. So I had to go through basic training before OCS. And so mental health was a big issue due to COVID. I was in the military during the lockdowns. I had a soldier survive his suicide attempt. Another friend of mine lost 13 men from his unit to suicide after Afghanistan, which is crazy, crazy numbers. I'm shoppable. I need to think about. And so when I got out, I just wanted to make sense of what was going on. What I felt as points of friction with my identity and who I was, I also wanted to apply, because I'm a big nerd, aspects of neurophysiology to the concept of being a leader in the military. What that means in an environment where your sympathetic response and their sympathetic response are constantly triggering on and off due to high intensity, high urgency, combat experience, things of that sort. Working with a lot of combat veterans. I witnessed the weight that they carried. And it just begged the question, how does a military leader stay tactically aggressive and at the same time show consideration and care and love for the men and women who are in their platoon, in their unit, who potentially are struggling with invisible weight? And so it's just one big constellation of variables. There's so many moving parts. So writing was just my way of kind of trying to process all this.
00:03:39 COURTNEY MULHURN
So where does one even start? How do you start to organize the thoughts pen to paper?
00:03:45 DANNY JOSEPH
So my first book was a journal entry that turned into like 400 pages. When I got out, I thought about my soldier, Cody. He wrote the introduction to the book. The foreword was written by Austin, who lost 13 of his men. And I started journaling on what could be done to help those who are hurting and struggling with depression, with suicidality, with difficult feelings. So I started a journal entry about the neurobiology that underlies chronic depression. So it was kind of like this dual process of what does my gut tell me? And then what does the science tell me? And I was trying to make sense of this. And all of a sudden I realized, hey, this is an interesting dualistic process here. So I'm looking at warm, fuzzy feelings. And then I'm looking at hardcore functional MRIs and brain scans and all that. And I wanted to marry the two. And then that turned into multiple pages. And then I thought, well, I could write about another soldier right now that I know. I could write about a Marine that I met and an airman and a Navy rescue swimmer, a Navy EOD. And so I started piecing together kind of this crumb trail of service members who inspired me and touched my life even before I joined the military. And this book came out with a little nuggets of advice that hopefully will help. Incoming leaders, especially junior officers, have a special kind of consideration for the nuanced variables of being a leader.
00:05:14 COURTNEY MULHURN
So then Backpack to Rucksack. So was there anything specific that made you want to focus your thoughts into this book? Or how did this one start?
00:05:27 DANNY JOSEPH
So yeah, this one started as the journal entries. And then I created the Combat Psych Handbook as a boiled down version of it. And I gear it specifically towards men because men tend to have less emotional vocabulary and they're much more inclined if you look at the rates of suicidality and successful suicides. It's way higher. I think it's four to one when it comes to men. And so there's just such a stigma on talking about feelings and discussing things. And so I wanted to give the troops some really, really boiled down lists of thoughts and phrases, self -talk, journal prompts. and just variations on how to describe their feelings, how to understand their feelings, and why it doesn't mean that they're weak because they experience very inconvenient feelings at times. Again, it goes down to the neurocircuitry of the brain. So that was a distilled version of Backpack to Rucksack.
00:06:21 COURTNEY MULHURN
I like how you organize the chapters. So you kind of give keywords at the beginning that will be discussed throughout the chapter with some definitions, and then an introduction, how to be a good... military leader, the psychological application, and then leadership advice?
00:06:38 DANNY JOSEPH
While I was in the Army, during the lockdowns, things got slow, right? A lot of the pipelines were shut down. So Ranger School, Airborne, Aerosol, everything was just on hold. And so I thought, and what do I do in an indefinite amount of time? And I thought, well, Army offers tuition assistance. So I started an online organizational psychology degree. And what I loved about getting a master's in org psych is that There's no necessarily right or wrong answer when you give a prompt to the professor, but you need to back it up with peer -reviewed journal citations. And so I started looking at terms and definitions and ideas and concepts in the world of psychology, but based on peer -reviewed journals. So there's a community of researchers that agree or disagree on certain things. And so I kind of brought that muscle memory into this book. And so I wanted to offer terms that basically provide a sense of objectivity. that I'm not just talking about my feelings and my perspective. Yes, a lot of the book reflects that for sure. But I also wanted to inject some objective truth that regardless of my biases, I wanted to mitigate that as much as possible. So I thought, let me add some of the words, the definitions, let me add some journal citations and give credit to researchers who did the science and then expand on that.
00:07:58 COURTNEY MULHURN
Definitely. And throughout this book, you discuss many of your relationships and with just other service members both peers friends and mentors as a part of your research so what was that like talking to different service men and women and hearing their stories and and just making them a part of this book a lot of these people molded me before i joined and while i was in i had my own issues growing up i had my own experiences and
00:08:20 DANNY JOSEPH
lot of these people molded me before i joined and while i was in i had my own issues growing up i had my own experiences and I was not in a healthy lifestyle before I joined and was asking myself existentially who I want to be in this world. I started meeting service members. I met some awesome Navy SEALs here at San Diego, started working out with them. I started meeting EODs who were coming back and forth from multiple deployments back to back in Afghanistan. I started having these conversations with people who were my demographic, my age range and all that, but they were doing some things in their lives that I just couldn't even wrap my head around. I saw their self -discipline. I saw their humility. I saw how focused they were and that they weren't doing horrible things with their lives like me and my friends were doing. And that rubbed off on me. I wanted to emulate that. And so this book is kind of a journey through all the different people who mentored me through the way they behaved, just observing them and seeing the qualities that they had. And yeah, I didn't have a great relationship with my father. And so especially for me, meeting male mentors was really cool to just understand what healthy masculinity looked like. And jujitsu played a big role in that as well. Getting me to just break my own ego or having black belts on the mats break my ego for me and allow me to reconstruct it in a healthy way. Just knock down my pride. I needed that. And then some of my sisters in arms showed me kind of their side of it too, what it was like being in the military with certain issues that they were facing. It was a family, you know, and so we all kind of bonded together. It was just cool identifying as service members wanting to strengthen America. And that was the overarching relationship that we had with each other. And anything else that we brought to the table, regardless of race, gender, any ideologies that we had, we just together in uniform, you know, we all needed to work together and that was it.
00:10:25 COURTNEY MULHURN
Absolutely. So how were you able to network across different branches and ranks? Like if there are units out there, you know, it's important. We're all brothers and sisters in this. So how would you suggest to network with each other?
00:10:40 DANNY JOSEPH
One big thing was jujitsu gyms. I guess fight houses. So if you do MMA, jujitsu, Muay Thai, things of that sort, you know, CrossFit, go to a gym where you meet people with uniforms, right? So you meet. all these different service members who are driven, who are motivated, who are making healthy decisions with their minds, their bodies. And that's a way to connect. I met a lot through like groups groups and men's groups and things like that, where I was intentionally seeking mentorship and just kind of spiritual guiding as well. And then honestly, just having, having conversations with people from whether you go to MEPS and you're joining, you just talk to the people left or right of you, or if you're at a D shock at a dining facility, I mean, Having that openness to just talk to people like they're people, regardless of rig. And I noticed that just the more relaxed someone is in approaching others in uniform, you allow them to relax as well. And you can have these awesome discussions. And one thing that was so cool was I'd be working with a soldier, let's say a senior NCO, who's fairly reserved. And then I would just ask them a question. Hey, so how long have you been in? Where have you deployed? what's your take on things going on right now and we would talk about what they experienced in combat like things would come up that they'd want to share voluntarily it was just so cool to know that they did these things for our country and they weren't looking for the limelight or anything by just validating that and asking them to share some wisdom you know i'm a new officer tell me something that i don't know that you know that you learned in war that you wanted them and you just see them light up And say, yeah, you know what, when it comes to this, this should be your focus. So these are your priorities. This is how you care for people. And then it would just blossom into these discussions where you realize you're talking to the smartest person in the room and they're also the quietest. They're the most reserved. I love that. You know, I'm just naturally curious about people's inner world and what makes them tick. I love that because in the military, it's so easy to loo