Welcome to episode 147 of Behind The Mission, a show that sparks conversation with PsychArmor's trusted partners in educational experts. My name is Duane France, and each week I'll be having conversations with podcast guests that will equip you with tools and resources to effectively engage with and support military service members, Veterans and their families. Find the show on all the podcast players or by going to www.psycharmor.org/podcast.

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

On today's episode, I'm having a conversation with a colleague and military spouse, Corey weathers, a licensed professional counselor sought after speaker consultant and award-winning author. Corey has focused her career for the last 20 years as a clinician, specializing in marriage, the military culture, special forces and leadership development. You can find out more about Corey by checking out her bio in our show notes. Let's get into my conversation with her and come back afterwards to talk about some of the key points. 

duane----he-him-_64_11-03-2023_064928: Corey, so glad to be able to have a conversation with you today. I'm excited to introduce you to the audience because we're colleagues, but we also have a connection in that your husband was one of what I consider one of my three chaplains in Afghanistan.

I'm looking forward to having you share your work with us, but first want to give you an opportunity to share a bit about yourself and why this work is such a passion for you.

corie-weathers_1_11-03-2023_074926: yeah, Dwayne, thank you so much for having me. I think my story, I've always wanted to be a clinician. I always knew that I wanted to work with people who'd experienced difficulty or trauma. I thought I was going to go into women's issues. In fact, I started off working in a residential home for women out of prison who were dealing with drug and alcohol abuse.

And I loved that time. and it was right in line with just the amazing population that I wanted to work with. And then My husband, Matt, came home one day and said he wanted to be a chaplain, which I said, no, this is not in our plan. In fact, I said no for about a year and a half before I finally was like, okay, now I understand what you want to do.

and really got to know this amazing, incredible tribe of people and. Fort Carson, Colorado in 2008 was our first duty station. That's the deployment you were talking about just a minute ago. And so I would say that was just a really formative time for us as a family. It was our first deployment. It was Matt's first deployment. 

It was a really difficult deployment. We didn't know that that was not out of the ordinary, that was not the normal deployment experience. And so that just set He. us and set me on this trajectory of wanting to serve this tribe. I know the amazing people that Matt was serving with, it was definitely, I wanted to work with service members, but back at home, from my perspective, while I was wrangling two toddlers and trying to get through deployment, really relying on my neighbors and on the community for not just community, but also support and well being.

it really just changed the trajectory of my life and it changed everything that I understood about people, about relationships, about the importance of community. and ultimately I think it changed my perspective of my career. and it was just that was the group of people that I wanted to serve this, amazing tribe that I both got to live in and work with.

duane----he-him-_64_11-03-2023_064928: You know, you said that, it was a formative time, significant understatement. I think really, as you'd mentioned, that being your first deployment, I think at that point that had been my second combat deployment. But even that brigade that your husband served with, that you were engaged.

Within and that I was in, had a really, that was a culmination of almost a three year period where it went from Korea, then to, Iraq, then to Colorado Springs, then back to Baghdad and the height of the search, like the people there and you had come in and you were engaging in this process, with the brigade and service members and families in a brigade that had really been through the ringer at that point.

And there was even subsequent beyond that,

corie-weathers_1_11-03-2023_074926: Yeah. In fact, when we came in, we had already, goodness, there was so much going on at home even before the deployment, the deployment, like we said, was very challenging. We had a mass casualty that we, as a group back at home that was prepared fully with care teams in case we did have any service members that we lost, we weren't even prepared for the scale that we needed to go through in serving in a mass casualty.

And we ended up from home needing to. figure out how to get the whole, installation involved. I was pulled into a press conference, it just was like, a very interesting way to initiate a family into this culture, but you're right, everybody coming in, I think was war weary already and then coming out of that and continuing after that, not only that brigade in particular, did they deal with a whole lot more after that, but we were, then we went to Fort Stewart after that.

And just, we continued to. see, force wide, just this, we were well into that first decade of a two decade war and it was just a significant time of weariness. I think we were all approaching burnout. I'm definitely going through a mass amount of grief. So it was an intense time, but I think that, when going back to the helping profession and what it means to serve this tribe.

number one, just incredibly inspired by the level of grit and ability to move through difficult things, was inspiring, but also, the compassion, I think that it stirred up in me of what are the limits? And I think that's something that's inspiring me today. Like what are the human limits? That a person and a community and a cohort, a culture, even what are the limits of what we can ask of a group of people before we need to talk about what does wellness look like, what does restoration look like?

and what does moral injury look like? All of those big questions that I know that a lot of people are starting to wrestle with now.

duane----he-him-_64_11-03-2023_064928: it's a really interesting concept, this idea of resilience born out of adversity, right? I describe it as coming out the other side of the valley of death, but you're absolutely right. you come out of some really difficult, challenging situations, combat, we're talking here specifically, but that anything that happens, these stressful things that happens in people's lives, and then you come out stronger.

But then you can't just keep piling on top of that. You can't just keep stacking things on top because, as you said, there is a limit on the farther end of that beyond the valley of death.

corie-weathers_1_11-03-2023_074926: Yeah, I agree. You know, I think we as humans. are hardwired for struggle. That's I think a Brene Brown quote. we are hardwired to endure suffering and grow from it and build character from it. All of those things are true. But I think that there needs to be a process of restoration, a process of healing that comes on the other side of that.

I think without that, that's where you see this compounding effect of where we do get into Whether it's post traumatic stress, or we get into some issues of depression, anxiety, or some of those other issues that come up when we've not either known how to restore or heal, or there's no process as a part of that, especially if you're just compounding trauma after trauma, or, what I think this culture has been through, which is just even just the compounding stress over time and no rest or no ability to process all of that in a healthy way.

We are known, especially the active duty community is known for, picking up and moving to the next location and starting over again. maybe even brushing aside what you just went through because this next group didn't go through it with you. And so we just kind of either repress it or just kind of tuck it away for later.

maybe we revisit it when we are around people who, we reconnect with in a reunion or something like that. But otherwise I think we are a community that is. taught to be resilient in some of the best ways. Resiliency is good, even though I think that word is now a bad word, a taboo word. I like to use grit, but, there's a cost.

I believe that there's a cost to it, even though it is a, it's something we will all as humans go through different points in our life of difficulty and we all can grow from it. But I do agree that there's limits.

duane----he-him-_64_11-03-2023_064928: it's definitely a good perspective. you've been mental health professional for a number of years, as you said, from the time when we were, co located the same place. We actually didn't even know each other back then. Of course, I knew, your husband, but, But then we connected afterwards, but you've been a mental health professional for a number of years, really still specifically serving service members, veterans and their families in the military population.

I'm curious about your perspective on the value of mental health professionals like ourselves, having lived experience with military culture, and really, living the life as well as supporting others as a clinician and as they're trying to live their lives.

corie-weathers_1_11-03-2023_074926: Yeah. Number one. I'm a huge fan of serving this tribe. And if you live in this tribe and understand it, as I say, live with and work with this amazing group of people, there is a cultural competency. That's just natural. That comes from it. I know when we moved to Fort Stewart and I, my kids were old enough to be in school and I was working in a group practice.

I had a wait list of a six month wait list. Most of them were military spouses and it had nothing to do with what I was doing. It really had more to do with, they found out that there was a military spouse that was a clinician, right outside the gates. And so I saw that consistently everywhere I went after that.

and cultural competency for especially mental health clinicians has become a huge passion of mine because I would just hear by the time I would get people in my office, I would just hear some tough stories of, veterans, service members and their families who would.

try out a clinician in the local area and just feel misunderstood, or just it taking a little bit longer to develop that rapport than they were comfortable with. And it became enough of a passion of mine that I started teaching on cultural competency to help those who maybe don't have the personal lived experience of this community.

And so while I'm a huge fan of, I think serving our own, in fact, there is an incredible number of military. spouse, mental health clinicians that are at the gate trying to get into TRICARE and contracted, trying to serve the military active duty and veteran community for sure. And we need to get them more easily into the pool of clinicians ready to serve because of 

the wait list that we have. So I'm a huge fan of doing whatever I can to support and advocate getting more professionals who do have that personal experience into the community. I also know that we have an incredible shortage and there are, are plenty of things that we can learn.

There's plenty of tips and tricks that you can pick up on that make you a culturally competent clinician. for example, just knowing that military families connect very quickly. They assess people very quickly because we are, especially active duty, relocating so often and starting over so often.

We learn how to connect with people who have common values. we discern whether or not you're a trusting person. And usually I think it really comes down to those common foundational values of right and wrong and service. And that's the good news is that as a provider, you have a servant heart, you have a desire to help people.

And I think that's one of the big values that brings service families into the community in the first place. And so Finding that common ground on what we believe in is a huge thing that you can share that develops rapport really quickly. But I think the main thing is. we as service families within five minutes, maybe 10 minutes, discern whether somebody is truly there to serve for the right reasons, whether or not they care and are interested and have curiosity, and whether or not they're ready to get going.

I have clients that tell me all the time that. They're ready to start working on whatever it is that they want to work on what they're bringing to the table in that first session, like if it takes five sessions just to build rapport and get going, they're going to get inpatient. So I often tell clinicians when we're talking about cultural competency, Establish that rapport very quickly. Get going, at least in that first session, giving them something to work on or just showing that you're curious. And I think that's what it really comes down to is, are you curious? Are you willing to learn? are you open to asking questions? even I have to be able to say that I don't know everything thing there is to know about this community.

And so being willing to lean in with curiosity and learn someone else's story and learn the things that I may not know and be open to whether or not my assumptions may be, driving the train instead of that curiosity is a great kind of tip for those who are trying to build that competency, that you absolutely are valuable and needed

duane----he-him-_64_11-03-2023_064928: Yeah, I, I really agree. I think the benefit of the shared background knowledge that, those with lived experience have, I mean, that's really, the shortcut is that they don't have to explain ETS, PCS, all the acronyms to you, right? There is a measure of shared background knowledge, but there's also shared aspects of the culture as you're talking about, the, let's get down to business, we've got urgent things to discuss.

And so I really appreciate that perspective. it's very valuable. so you've written multiple books. The latest is recently released as we're recording this. It's called Military Culture Shift, the impact of war, money, and generational perspective on morale retention and leadership.

Interestingly, the words mental health are nowhere in that title. I'm interested to hear about the book and why you thought it was an important discussion to have at this time.

corie-weathers_1_11-03-2023_074926: Yeah, first of all, it's such a long tagline that goes through the book, but really,we were really trying to highlight what is a very deeply complex and multi layered book, but story, I think the easiest way to describe this book, especially as it relates to mental health is after 15 years of working with this culture of I'm working with all the branches at various ranks from, our youngest enlisted all the way up to our senior leadership.

I really spent a lot of time not only working in the counseling office, but traveling and speaking, having conversation at the lunch table with different people, like just really collecting stories and collecting information and just me leaning into that curiosity to try to understand. And I really took a clinical approach, almost like an organizational psychology approach to the culture, and I wanted to zoom out and understand, like, what are the shifts and changes that have happened in this community?

Because what I found was, especially recently, there's a lot of clashing of generations happening, which is normal. I think as young generations come in, there's always going to be a clash with the older generations. But when you have. A culture like the military community that is really steeped in tradition.

a certain way of doing things. There's a lot of structure. There's a lot of regulations. There's a lot of, order and even, subtle rules of things that you do and don't do. It's really difficult to, shift that culture and, they tend to be slow in, in shifting things and mirroring what's happening in a civilian community.

So I was beginning to see generations clash values, start to clash a lot of confusion that was happening and starting in 2011 shortly after the deployment that you and I were talking about a few minutes ago, I was noticing some shifts that were happening in the culture as that community that I told you about that just was so amazing during that first deployment for me.

was starting to disintegrate in other, in other installations that we would go to. People weren't coming out of their homes. Kids weren't playing as much on the playground. Things were starting to shift. And I took note of that and I basically zoomed out and almost like a clinician looking at the culture, what's going on.

So when people come in for counseling, they bring these set of symptoms and issues and they're the things that they're struggling with. And they're basically saying, please help. This is going on in my life and I want it to look different. And I almost imagined in my mind, if the military culture was coming into my office.

and was saying, here's all the things that we're going through. We've got recruitment issues, we've got retention issues, morale is going down, people are leaving, families are burned out. there's all these issues that are happening. Our military kids are now being, researched as having more diagnoses and more issues with mental health than ever before.

So all these presenting issues are coming into my office. Then as a clinician, we probably would write down, okay, let me get a track of everything that you're saying. And then I would pause and I would go. Tell me your story. tell me, how did we get here? before I would ever come up with solutions.

And maybe like those listening, I found myself frustrated as I would hear in the news or in articles, the DOD specifically doing the best they could honestly, to address these issues, kind of like whack a mole with one, singular issue at a time, like we're going to try to address suicide.

We're going to try to address sexual harassment when, the complexity of really everything that was going on was a lot messier than that. And it was a lot more, compounding variables. So the book is actually the story of how did we get to where we are right now? What are all the shifts that have happened over the last two decades for sure.

But I actually go all the way back to world war one and the that were made along the way to create what we have today and how some of those decisions influenced what we're even seeing in the last 10 years. And so my goal is to really help anyone, any leader that's picking up the book, really understand the person that's standing in front of them and how Gen Z has a different stance.

Thank you. story, the millennials and how Gen X has gone through something especially significant with boomers is coming out of the Gulf War and these two decades of the war on terrorism. So I really wanted leaders to understand the broader cultural story, but also the story of the person that's standing in front of them.

duane----he-him-_64_11-03-2023_064928: somebody, once told me that, the definitive books about conflicts, are usually written 15 to 20 years after the conflict ends. If we think of, the things they carried came out in the 80s when the Vietnam, the height of the conflict was in the late 60s. maybe I'm speaking to the future.

This perhaps being definitive work. but this, but what you're talking about is taking time to get a perspective on what's happened. and obviously again, you and I, from different aspects this has been the first multi generational conflict. in American history, the senior leaders at the beginning of Global War on Terror were Vietnam era leaders.

They were platoon leaders and commanders in Vietnam when they, the, you would think about the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior NCOs. then my generation, Generation X, of course, and then the Millennials, and then even into the young troops that were leaving Afghanistan right at the end were probably the beginning of Gen Z, into the military, right?

There is this really broad range, this 20 year conflict touched almost four generations of service members, not to discount even the fact that my younger brother and I, sons of combat veterans, nephews of combat veterans became combat veterans ourselves. and this multi generational inter family aspect, I can see where that really plays a big role in all of this.

corie-weathers_1_11-03-2023_074926: Yeah. And I think that was one of the key moments. The end, the withdrawal of Afghanistan was one of the key moments where I really knew it was time to put this material out. Obviously, I had a lot of information collected in my head that I needed to get out. But just seeing, the impact of that withdrawal on the different generations.

when you have spent a majority of your career fighting that war, there was so much grief and so much anger and so much frustration, that I saw. What could be almost like a repeating of what a lot of our Vietnam veterans had gone through for the older generations who had invested a lot in the last two decades.

And then to your point, we had Gen Z. In fact, I have a podcast that will go out that will supplement, the book to help generate just additional conversation around the topics in the book. And I interviewed a Gen Z Marine who was at Abbey gate when that bomb went off in Afghanistan. And so hearing his perspective of why he joined in the first place, what he saw during his time in and even just that withdrawal, how that shifted his perspective of the military, of the community, of what it means to serve.

and I, spoiler alert, he's out and he's actually part of a nonprofit where he feels like he can channel a lot more of that. Selfless service in a different direction than the military because he was very skewed by a different experience than those of us who experienced the military before social media came on the scene and our community really went more online in that first decade.

Our experience, I would say a lot of us. We're trying to, especially in leadership, fight for something, fight for a culture that has shifted. It's not quite the way that it was, 15 years ago. And we've got to do some hard work on asking some big questions. I call it evolve or educate.

Some things we're going to have to evolve on, to help bring in this new, amazing, younger generational cohort and there's some other things that we might need to mentor on so that we keep some of those traditions that are really important.

duane----he-him-_64_11-03-2023_064928: you're absolutely right, taking a stroll down memory lane here. I think, the focus, is I and my platoon leader and company commander and first sergeant at that time was trying to make sure that they didn't post everything on my space back then was the, to date myself, but absolutely.

I think this is, this seems to be the right conversation at the right time as the military really, as you were mentioning is thinking about, we just came out of this. What next? And I think that what next is really an important conversation to have. And hopefully your book is generating a lot of those conversations.

so if people wanted to find out more about you, the work you're doing, the book where they can find it, how can they do that?

corie-weathers_1_11-03-2023_074926: Yeah. The easiest way is just, you can find all of that on my website, Cory weathers.com. That's C-O-R-I-E. Weather's like the weather outside with an S, otherwise you can find the book Military Culture Shift on Amazon, militaryfamilybooks. com, Barnes and Noble, Google it, like it'll be there. The podcast is the same name, Military Culture Shift podcast, to go with the book.

But Duane, thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about it. And thank you for the shared passion of serving this community. It really, I know is something that's important to both of us, but this tribe is worth it. they have done so much to serve our community and our country and they deserve the very best. So thank you for having me.

duane----he-him-_64_11-03-2023_064928: Absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

 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 you can find more about PsychArmor at www.psycharmor.org.

I'm glad that you were able to learn about Cory and hopefully this has interested you in learning more about her and checking out her book. As you can tell Corey and I are both passionate about serving the military affiliated population and feel strongly about the need for cultural responsivity and working with those who served and those who care for them. Which has also a passion for the folks at psychomotor, of course. I like to take a few minutes to talk about the benefit of mental health professionals with lived experience in this community. 

Like Corey. As the old saying goes the best preachers of former center and someone with lived experience within a culture and a community and the clinical training as a mental health professional can be a really good advocate for mental health and wellness and service members, veterans, and their families. As I mentioned, there's the shared background, knowledge of the military. 

What it's like to move from Colorado to Georgia to experience a combat deployment from either the perspective of a service member or a family member to understand the terminology and acronyms. But it's also beneficial. Like Corey said in that there is a shortcut to trust and easier connection to the therapist that is a critical component to the therapy process. When I often talk about mental health professionals with lived experience military culture. However, I repeatedly emphasized that I am not someone who believes that this is the only way or even the best way to support this population. someone who served, who is also a clinician, must be very careful to ensure that there are clear boundaries between them and the client. 

Especially if there are some shared experiences. when I was working as a clinician, I was still in the same community where I was when I was serving. And there were several times that I had clients who were in the same brigade as I was in Corey's husband Or even was on different areas of the same battlefield as I was During the same deployment. It just because shared experiences are a shortcut to rapport building and trust doesn't mean that a non-military affiliated clinician cannot build rapport and trust. It may take a bit longer, but a skilled clinician can get there for sure. And the simple fact is there are not enough mental health professionals with military experience to serve the need that's out there. 

So we have to work together. But if you are a mental health professional, I encourage you to connect with or locate a colleague that does have military experience so that you can both benefit from a collaborative relationship. 

The other point that I'd like to bring up is related to something that Corey said at the end of our conversation. As you might know, I re listened to all of the conversations after we have them. And sometimes I realize that there is something compelling that I missed something I wished I would have picked up on during the conversation and talked a little bit more about my conversation with Corey was one of those times. She said we have some hard work to do in relation to a culture that has shifted in the past 20 years. that we have to evolve or educate either evolve the culture to 

bring in the younger generational cohort or mentor on some other things to ensure that we keep some of the traditions that are valuable in the military. I heard it as she was saying it, but then made a joke about worrying about my space as a leader. But I think that her point was so much more profound than just keeping up with the current trends on social media platforms. The idea that we must evolve to adjust to the new generational cohort. that's not new to the military, even though those who served in the military may think that it was so much tougher in my day. I remember going to basic training at Fort Leonard wood in the early nineties. And guess what? It wasn't like full metal jacket. My drill sergeants. Didn't lay a hand on us and I promise you, I don't remember our lead drill Sergeant saying as much as a single curse word. He was definitely creative in his language choices to make it seem as though he were calling us everything under the sun. but he didn't actually do it. my point is I might've been in the shift between the previous generation, the baby boomers, the Vietnam veterans, and my generation generation X. And the culture in the army changed significantly in the post Vietnam era with the rise of the all volunteer force in the seventies and the establishment of the professional non-commissioned officer Corps and arguably changes for the better. 

So even in relatively recent history, there are examples of evolution to adapt the military culture to the incoming generations. At the same time, there needs to be education around why certain things are done and why it's important to keep the traditions that are so significant in the military. For those who served in the army, the army values are likely ingrained in your psyche loyalty duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, personal courage. Guess what I remember when those came out, when the army actually put them down into words, I was on a training exercise in Holland fellows, Germany, and was reading the leadership field manual that had just been released. 

Yeah, I was that kind of soldier. And I remember reading those words and being struck by the truth of them. Yes. Those values were values that I appreciated and attempted to embody. It's not that they were new per se, but they were finally incorporated into a concept, put into words that were easy for me to understand and share with others. That's an example of how I was educated about a culture that was relatively new to me. 

This was in 1995 and I'd only been in the army for about three years at that point. So again, these two elements of evolve and educate have been done before. So there's no reason to think that they can't be done again. Those who don't remember, history are doomed to repeat it after all, but hopefully military leaders or any leaders can pick up Corey's latest book and apply some of these concepts to their own leadership journey. So I hope you appreciated this conversation with Corey. 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 us at info@psycharmor.org. We're always glad to hear from listeners, both feedback on the show and suggestions for future guests. But this week PsychArmor resource of the week, I'd like to share the PsychArmor core series, the basics of military culture. In this four-part series powered by PsychArmor in partnership with Comcast NBC universal. 

You'll hear stories from six American service members about their experiences serving our country. If I had a link to the resource in our show notes.