Episode 101 Transcription

Welcome to Episode 101 of Behind The Mission, a show that sparks conversations with PsychArmor trusted partners and educational experts. My name is Duane France and each week I'll be having conversations with podcasts guests that will equip you with tools and resources to effectively engage with and support military service members, Veterans, and their families. You can find the show on all the podcast players or by going to www.psycharmor.org/podcast. 

Thanks again for joining us and Behind The Mission. Our work in mission are supported by generous partnerships and sponsors who also believe that education changes lives. Our sponsor this week is PsychArmor, the premier education and learning ecosystem specializing in military culture content. PsychArmor offers an online e-learning laboratory that's free to individual learners as well as custom training options for organizations. Find out more at www.psycharmor.org.

On today's episode, we're featuring a conversation with Army Veteran, Andrew Morton, who currently serves on PsychArmor Strategic Communications Team in the role of External Relations. Andrew is a retired Army officer with a combined 30 years of service experience within the military community and Veteran employment and transition space. Since his transition from active duty, Andrew spent much of the last decade focused on Veterans employment and transition initiatives across various strategic roles at the Society For Human Resource Management. His lived experiences as a soldier and military spouse also instilled a passion for behavioral health and wellness. As part of his journey, he's completing the final clinical portion of his master's in mental health counseling from the College of William and Mary and serving as a therapist intern with the Veterans Administration, which he will complete in May of 2023. You can find out more about Andrew by checking out his bio in our show notes. So let's get into my conversation with him and come back afterwards to talk about some of the key points. 

DUANE: So Andrew, great to have you on the show. You've had a varied and interesting career trajectory, both inside the military and in your post-military life. I'm interested in hearing more about your work supporting Veterans and why the work that you're doing now, both with PsychArmor and also the mental health work, how that ties into your military service and why it's important.

ANDREW: Yeah, absolutely. And first of all, Duane, thank you for having me as a part of the program. It's kind of an honor to work one for PsychArmor and be a part of that mission. And two, to share what I think, for me has really been a first person journey, in my military career. I did a lot of communications work on top of being an infantry officer in the Army. And I think in many respects, particularly in that deployed environment of the two thousands and the 2000 tens, I think what we found ourselves doing more often than not was really not just trying to tell a story, but also to tell a story in a way that connects people and gets people to understand some commonalities, across different cultures.

But also to emphasize, the importance of the mission that we are doing on any given day. Communications is always a critical part of anything. It's a critical part of individual relationships between partners. It's a critical part of father/son relationship. It's a critical part of anything that we do.

And my military career was an extension of what I was good at in college, you know, as most theater majors would be apt to do, I joined the military . It doesn't make a lot of sense, maybe from the outside looking in, but I really feel like that storytelling component of it is that's important is always going to be a foundation of success. And I feel like that's still a part of what I did when I retired from the military in 2012. And I had the honor of working with Veterans initiatives for the Society for Human Resource Management and how critical a role HR plays in serving not just the needs of the organization, but also their employees.

And Veterans being a part of that network of employees and then trying to get employers to understand beyond some of the stereotypical perceptions may be perpetuated by Hollywood or otherwise who Veterans are. But at the same time also getting Veterans to recognize that military culture certainly is important but in order to be a part of Veteran culture, you have to set specific things aside as you transition to the private sector. So it wasn't just telling employers that they had a responsibility to adapt to Veterans, so it was also reminding Veterans that they had a responsibility to adapt to their new normal.

They certainly didn't go into the Marine Corps or the Navy, or the Army or the Coast Guard or the Air Force expecting to go in as a full-fledged civilian for the rest of their air force or whatever career. And you certainly can't expect to serve the rest of your life as a civilian, as an airman, marine soldier or anything else. You have to put aside specific things. So getting employers and getting Veterans themselves to meet somewhere in the middle or to meet in common ground where they both can have a mutually beneficial post-military existence for the Veteran and then for the organization to have a Highly trained, adaptable employee.

DUANE: I really appreciate how you just pointed out the importance of communication and especially that communication on the part of the employer. These are the expectations, but there's an adaptations there. And then on the part of the Veteran themselves, how they might have to adapt but the military is very relational. Maybe people don't think of it that way. Wspecially if they're coming in from the outside. It's just the commander says, and the soldier does. But you, having been in the military, that important part of communication be a key aspect of relationships. There is a bond, obviously, that's what people tend to miss in the military is the camaraderie, the old army buddies or we can all think of different ways that we've had meaningful rich relationships. A lot of the success in the military is based on the importance of relationships and how that ties into communication.

ANDREW: No, you're exactly right. Communications is important for relationships, and relationships are important for communications. Which one is the tail and which one's the dog is not necessarily the most important component of it, just knowing that for you to be successful, you need both elements.

And you're right, when people do transition, from the military, one of the most important things you have to do is you have to bring back your networking skills and you have to develop a way of communicating, maybe setting aside some of the vernacular you may have used in a previous culture or a previous life, so to speak.

And, what's really important about that is this process of continual learning. Often I would have HR practitioners and organizations ask me, what are the most effective traits that Veterans have? Competencies, if you will. And I would say that in general, they're continual learner. And they're adaptable, to multiple environments. While it may not seem like that, it may seem very lockstep from the outside looking in, what you'll typically find, particularly at the small unit level, when you get down to the individual, soldiers, Marines, airmen's, ailors, et cetera, you see somebody who's very adaptable, she or he is, very much, working within the parameters of the mission, but also, keeping in mind that they have to be flexible they have to understand essentially what the overarching intent is, but then work within that. And some of that is set to the side when they transition from the military. And that might be part of the challenge. 

You know what I'm finding, as a mental health counselor is, that some of the struggles are real and they're about that transition and about that maneuvering from one space to next, but nevertheless, resiliency and the overarching competencies and the cultural awareness of these Veterans really shine through.

DUANE: No, I absolutely agree. I think in my clinical experience, I saw the same thing. You could drop any service member in the middle of any location, and they would adapt to the operational environment, right? As we said, they would figure it out with resources. We don't tend to communicate that need, that they're gonna have to do that when they get out of the military.

And so once they're out of the military, they feel like I don't need to adapt to the environment. I need to require the environment to adapt to me. And I've seen that sort of concept in a lot of Veterans. And I think that's a mindset shift a lot of veterans don’t make. You had the unique experience and as you mentioned your communications background, but even as part of your military job, it was to communicate military things to people that may not understand or may not be familiar with the military way of doing things, thinking media, thinking host nation partners and things like that. Translating military concepts and culture to non-military people is something that you learned. But a lot of Veterans struggle with that as you were just referring to in post-military life, not understanding A) the need to do that or even how to do that.

ANDREW: Yeah, no, you're right. You have to be willing to communicate, not just through your own vernacular, but also through a lens which the person you're trying to communicate to can best understand. And whether it was doing Arabic media relations in Iraq as a part of what I had a responsibility do, we were dealing with a very skeptical audience, rightfully so in many respects.

We were dealing with, nevertheless, a very important audience because frankly, it was their region of the world in their both country. So we had an expectation to explain ultimately how our presence there was going to support their goals. How our presence there was going to help provide them with a better society, ultimately in the long run.

And we couldn't do it through our lens. We had to do it and be willing to do it through their lens and to build that trust. So I think a lot the foundation of it is trust. And with trust there's a responsibility to not just think in your own mindset, but also as you had said, to be willing to adjust your mindset and to better understand the person you're trying to communicate to. Whether that's on a macro level, as a part of the media relations team that I had an opportunity to, or whether it's talking to a very skeptical young man or woman about their own mental health needs and whether or not they believe that their own mental health needs will be supported, by me or any other person who's there to help them feel better.

DUANE:  And I think this idea of transition and you've identified in some of our communications, the concept of transition itself, leaving the military, it can be traumatic. It can be challenging. And I think that this is something that both through lived experience, we've all experienced it to, to some extent. But then also many listeners who are supporting Veterans see that. But it doesn't mean that trauma needs to be permanent with the right support and opportunities. That trauma can be resolved a little bite. 

ANDREW:That's exactly right. And the mental health space that, I'm currently working in and serving in, and have the honor to work directly with the VA as a part of my internship now. What I am seeing and what we do see is the concept of transition itself being traumatic because of that collective community that many military service members and their families for that matter, are transitioning from it. It's a sense of loss, sometimes more palatable then maybe the trauma they may have experienced in combat, if that's the case. So of course, we have to work through individually traumatic experiences, whether it's post-traumatic stress or other combat related challenges that Veterans face.

Those are absolutely important. But even the Veteran who may have been blessed to make it through their military experience unscathed physically, or mentally through those particular challenges. We know that a shift in culture is a hard thing to do. Let's be honest, that's why coming into the military is a challenging thing to do because it's a shift of culture. It is no less challenging to shift back into the civilian world. But again, as long as those young men and women are equipped with the opportunities and with the other things that are an important part of that process and a sense of belonging, then we know that they will thrive. And that's really ultimately the goal cuz no matter how long someone serves in the military, whether it's 20 years, like I had the privilege and honor of serving. Or whether it's two to four years or 30 years, we know that there's life after the military. And we also know that life after the military is generally something that we all wanna have meaning in.

And that's really the rub right there is to help determine and figure out what that might be. It could be on some grant scale. It could be a whole career. Or it could be just a peace of mind in transitioning to maybe volunteerism or other opportunities that are out there. But regardless of what it is, we know our most prominent needs and you know this as a mental health provider yourself, our predominant needs are physical safety and, and belonging. And that's why it's so important to have these opportunities to work with employers and to work with organizations and others out there so that they can see that Veterans are really looking for that, that next mission, that next really purpose driven mission after the military.

DUANE: You're absolutely right. Like you, having spent over 20 years in the military god willing, we're gonna be Veterans three times as long as we were service members, right? If for some young men and women who did one or two tours, they're gonna be Veterans eight to 10 times longer than they were service members. And so there's this very meaningful part of their lives. That again, there is a purpose in meaning or baked into the military, the whole reason why you're doing it. But then there's a struggle and it's not just a transitional struggle for recently transitioning service members, I got out in 2014 and I'm still in the beginning. Maybe I'm at the end of the beginning, but I'm still at the beginning of my transition. My father served in Vietnam and I don't think he fully transitioned for 40 or 50 years.

ANDREW: No,you're absolutely right. And that's not to say that's necessarily a bad thing per se, because there are things that you want to you wanna keep, you do want to keep some of those cultural attributes and some of the things that you experience in your military time.

That's certainly, there's no problem with that whatsoever. The biggest thing though is to address the most basic and most important and fundamental needs first. And that is, really that sense that I belonged, that identity. Even though I may have been Master sergeant, Retired Jones or, Brigadier General Retired Smith, the brigadier general part is certainly something I'm proud of, but it doesn't necessarily define me in my post-military existence. Maybe I'm grandpa or maybe I'm boss, or maybe I'm just Fred or maybe I'm just Aaron. The key is to fall into identity in a way that allows the person to really feel like they belong. And of course, you have to work through the trauma occasionally that Veterans may have experienced through combat and otherwise. But once you get past that trauma, which there are so many modalities and so many treatments and so many things that not just the VA, but all these behavioral health providers have given military members in their post-military existence. It's just wonderful to see people go from what I call aliving, so to speak, by barely just hanging on to thriving. But then once you get there, then the question is what's next? Because I'm not willing to just stop here. I, retirement, I think the definition of retirement is like to go someplace static or move butchering the heck out of Webster's definition of it, but I don't like that definition. I don't think most people like that definition. My definition of retirement is what's next? Let's do something next. It could very well be just with my family. It could be with my wife. It could be whatever it is. It could be volunteering, it could be working for a nonprofit like PsychArmor, which I'm just so happy to be a part of. But the point is, it's on our terms, right? And it's based upon what we truly believe is right for us.

DUANE: You know that, that puts me in mind in some of the stories we heard about, there were concerns in New York City after 9/11 about sort of resurgence stress from, say, like Gulf War Veterans and Cold War Veterans of Vietnam Veterans. What they found was the stress was lessened because those Veterans found they had a purpose again. Now, you've recently joined PsychArmor as part of their communications team using your military background, your clinical training, and your communications experience to spread the word about PsychArmor itself. You've recently wrote a blog, we'll include a link to that in the show notes, about hope being a course of action. I know as a service member, a course of action, a way to get something done, right? The COAs or how we do things, but your perspective is hope specifically is a course of action, that can be used to support Veterans in post-military life.

ANDREW: Yeah. And you have the shared experience. Sometimes people would say, hope is not a course of action, a very pejorative way, reminding us that you gotta roll your sleeves up and work harder. Don't just hope that things happen. And that was my experience as an infantry officer.

Now my experience, I've really flipped on its head as I've become a part of this mental health field. And that is hope is absolutely an essential, critical part of everyone's healing. And I use it as an acronym too, when I wrote that piece, because I think it's so critical for us to understand the four primary components of mental health support truly being accessible and available to everybody.

And the first part is really the h is about health and healing for Veterans and military family members, that's primary. We have to make sure physical, emotional wellbeing, psychological wellbeing through health and healing. The o piece of the hope is really about others cuz we can't do it on our own.

We need to recognize that we need support elements. And those support elements can come in all forms. And that's including organizations like PsychArmor and the resources and tools that they deliver to help educate many different organizations on who Veterans are. And the p is that purpose piece that we talked about, that sense of belonging. Because while everybody really, truly deserves a sense of belonging and needs a sense of purpose, if you spent a few years or a couple decades in the military, you really live on that. You really do. And then to have it stripped away from you is hard. And that's not to say it needs to be on a grant scale.You don't need to save lives to have purpose. You can just impact somebody's life on a daily basis. An organization's willingness to allow you to go volunteer one day a month at Big Brothers and Big Sisters gives a person purpose. It makes them more committed to their everyday job if they see somebody who's willing to allow them to go out and to fill that purpose bucket every single week. And then the E is about empowerment. Now, I know I said you need others and you do, but the mantra of the mental health professional and the mantra I think of everybody in this space is, you have to give people resources and tools to do it on their own. And that's a critical component to it. You have to allow people the resources to become the authors of their own post-military life. In this particular case that we're talking about Veterans and their own health and healing. Hope is a course of action as an acronym and it's a course of action. The clients that I see, I have the great opportunity to see from a Vietnam Veteran who just started therapy after 50 years to, the young man that I saw today who was 23 years old. When you hear people say, I want to feel better and I hope I can feel better, and I'm hopeful for this or that, then, you know, you're halfway there. Now, it's not to say that the journey's just built on hope, but people need to have accessibility to hope. And they need to believe that not only do they have a way forward, that they deserve it.

And all these Veterans that I work with and all the people I have the privilege of working alongside, they deserve hope. But we do have to deliver it to them in a meaningful way. And I think, health and healing relationships with others. Helping people find their next purpose-driven mission or their sense of purpose, and then empowering them to be the authors of their own lives and their own stories. That's what it's all about.

DUANE: I absolutely agree. I think and especially the work that I even do more specifically now with suicide prevention, hope is the one thing that may be keeping someone to move on. It's the hopelessness. That's when I really start to get concerned is if someone, loses the hope. And so that concept of hope as the course of action, I think is a very critical concept. 

I also really appreciate how the acronym's broken out and how all of them are critical. Health and healing. Yeah. I've got five combat and operational deployments. You don't go through that without a couple dents in offenders, both physically and psychologically, right? And so there is going to need to be a form of healing in some way, big or small. Relationships with others are critical. Some people have asked me how I've, been “successful” post-military life. I didn't come home to an empty house and I still have good relationships with my family. That's one thing that has really been able to sustain me.

Those two things without purpose, that purposeness is very critical. And then someone can go through their healing. They can still have relationships with others, they can still have a sense of purpose, but if they're not empowered to engage in the world on their own, and if everything's just handed to them, then it's not the full and complete life either. And so I really appreciate how you've brought all of that together, into a way that people need to understand that this isn't something like you were talking about earlier. It's not on the human resources to go all the way over to the gap and serve the Veteran in their every need. There has to be a halfway in employment, in mental health, in everything in the post-military life. It's all an adaptation in everyone working together.

ANDREW: No, you're exactly right. And I guess what I would say in response to everything that you just said is that this is not rocket science, but we do have to make inroads on awareness. We have to make inroads on accessibility of behavioral healthcare and support, and we have to make inroads in terms of attitudes. Now, when I say attitudes, that can be on the individual level. There may be some cultural resistance on the part of folks to mental health support. Depending upon where their background is and what they know or what they may perceive. And there also may be organizational challenges too, but I've seen so much of a shift in willingness to acknowledge and embrace the importance of mental and behavioral health. And again, not just for people who are aliving. And again, I use the term aliving and I know it's not a real word. But what I mean by that is those who are just really struggling, those who may be suicidal, those who are at risk for self-harm. Those who are in immediate need of support, that's the aliving group.

But then there's also a group just above them. Those are the surviving folks. Those are the ones who wake up every day feeling a void, maybe feeling that the pressure financially or interpersonally with the relationships that they have, just struggling to get to the point where they can put their head back down again at night.And then maybe not even getting a peaceful night's sleep. And then, beyond the surviving part, there's thriving and even those who are “thriving” or perceived to be thriving from the outside looking in, they still may have their own internal struggles. They still may have that angst and that sense of lack of fulfillment. The point of which is to say that, from everybody, from those who are aliving to surviving, to thriving, we don't wanna parse out any particular part of that group. Everybody can use mental health support. Everybody can do themselves a great bit of good to see a holistic approach to your own health, and that's a part of what PsychArmor is delivering, not just to organizations, but also to individual. And that's why it's such a critical part of, why I'm just excited to be a part of this team.

DUANE: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, obviously in our conversations together, the message is coming through loud and clear, and hopefully that's coming out for the audience as well. If folks wanted to find out more about the work that you're doing, maybe they want to connect with PsychArmor, in your work in the communications team with PsychArmor, how can they do that? 

ANDREW: Well the first thing is you go to our great website, www.psycharmor.org. As a part of the website itself, you can see the mission, you can see some of the educational resources and tools. Much of which is just completely accessible. And then also for organizations that are looking to do a deeper dive to reach out to us, to reach out to not just our communications team, but our operations team. Tina, as our CEO, has done an amazing job of really telling that story, which is where we began that podcast about the importance of storytelling and what an incredible job she's done stewarding the all of this along with just, an incredible team. So I would say go and start at www.psycharmor.org. I'm on LinkedIn, Andrew R. Morton on LinkedIn. Look for me and connect with me. I tried to avoid the other social media platforms. Probably spent too much, too much time on those in a previous life when I did communication stuff. So I'm happy staying on LinkedIn for now. But, just reach out to us. Duane, again, my particular thanks to you for helping us share the story.

DUANE: Absolutely. and glad to do it. And I also believe that sharing the story is the critical piece. And I'll make sure all of those things are gonna be in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

ANDREW: Thank you, and, and I wish everybody, you know, a happy January and February. I know for us on the East coast, it's cold. It gets a little gray, but, literally and figuratively, spring is just on the horizon. So we're all gonna be all right.

Once again, we would like to thank this week's sponsor, PsychArmor. PsychArmor is the premier education and learning ecosystem specializing in military culture content. PsychArmor offers an online e-learning laboratory that's free to individual learners as well as custom training options for organizations. 

And I'm glad that Andrew joined the show to talk about his unique perspective on communications and storytelling. Like many Veterans, he has an interesting set of skills that come together in a novel way. From his time in the military, both as an infantry officer and a public affairs officer to his work with employers as part of SHRM and now his clinical training as a mental health professional. Each of those experiences gives him a perspective into post-military life that I think is going to be very beneficial for those clients that he works with as a therapist. But also the work that he's doing to tell the story of PsychArmor. One of the things that I appreciated about our conversation was how Andrew emphasize the need for adaptability. Post-military life support and success requires adaptation on the part of both those who are trying to support the Veteran as well as the veteran themselves. And that adaptability requires the need for perspective, taking on both sides. Those are trying to support the Veteran, whether it's employers, service providers, volunteer organizations, or whatever needs to understand where the Veteran or military family member is coming from. There needs to be an understanding of the unique cultural factors of military service. Which of course is where PsychArmor could definitely support. But there's also a need for the Veteran and family member to adapt as well. That's where the empower concept of Andrew's hope acronym comes in. The Veteran themselves needs to be empowered to have some say in their post-military life. We can't just hand everything to someone expect them to be self-sufficient and someone who expects to be handed everything won't be self-sufficient. There needs to be an adaptation on both sides. The gap that exists in anything we do is not going to be bridged by an unreasonable lack of compromise. The gaps are only going to be narrowed and eliminated by some folks stepping out into that gap. And that can only be done once we understand the perspective of others. 

The other point that I'd like to make is something that Andrew mentioned a couple times the need for Veterans to find something meaningful in their post-military life. I have a colleague fellow podcaster, who describes that he was the type of person who didn't see a place for himself in the world. He didn't do well in school, which turned out to be a result of undiagnosed learning disabilities. But he went on to have a successful career in Silicon Valley. He says that for some people there's a place for them in the world, a doctor shaped space for them to fit into, or a teacher space or a mechanic space, but he didn't see a space for himself. He had to go out and create a space for him to fit into. 

If we take that perspective to service members, there was a space for me and Andrew in the world, and that was a soldier-shaped space. And now for all of the reasons we can't fit into that space anymore. What do we do with our lives? When the one thing we feel like we were meant to do, we can no longer do. 

For some Veterans many of us have seen it, there isn't an adaptation. They just continue on their post-military life as if it were an extension of their military service. For others, there is a complete transition and the military was something was just an episode in their lives rhat was probably less impactful than some of their other endeavors. The point that I'm trying to make, and that Andrew was getting at is it many Veterans I have to make an effort to find a place for themselves in post-military life, or create a place for themselves in post-military life. They have to be aware that they need to do that. And sometimes they need support to do that as well. So, hopefully you appreciated my conversation with Andrew. If you did, we'd appreciate hearing from you. So if you do have some feedback, let us know, drop a review in your podcast, player of choice, or send us an email at info@psycharmor.org. We're always glad to hear from listeners, both feedback on the show and suggestions for future guests. 

For this week’s  PsychArmor Resource of the Week, I'd like to share the PsychArmor course Telling Your Story. Aservice member's experience in the military is one that only they can tell and it's up to them how much they choose to share with others. In this course, four Veterans share their personal stories and offer insight. You can find a link to the resource in our show notes.