A Chance in Hell, Pt 2 | Ft. Chance Burles

When I got out of the military, I totally believe that the standard needs to be maintained. If I let go of the standard, then the world's going to fall apart.

Welcome to Therapy is My Therapy, a podcast where licensed counselor Olivia and unlicensed client Tanya delve deep into real and raw conversations in order to demystify what really happens in that 50 minute hour. Heads up. This podcast contains strong language and sensitive topics related to mental health.

Oh, I just had a question regarding. From what I understand, the military seemed to, for lack of a better term, indoctrinate on board the. Their members. Kind of like Asian kids. It's. It feels like Asian parenting in the sense of, you know, it's very exact. It's very. There's a level of perfectionism just because if you don't do the thing, you will die or your teammate will die. But the best and potentially problematic part of it all is the collective mentality because while that is great of serving the world and serving others, I find that there isn't a very high level of care turned inwards. And I feel like that was some of where my association of embrace the suck is that I can keep going. I'm emotionally or mentally speaking, I'm walking wounded, but I am going to keep going. Whatever, don't care. And I find a lot of people who are in, I don't call it like service. They don't realize that when you take care of yourself that you have more to give to others and to do more of, to do more of what you think is worthwhile, which is serving.

Yeah, we actually just had a conversation on this, on the gold mine a couple days ago. One of the things we, we brought up was the fact that service in and of itself, if you want to serve anybody, you're going to have to give up something. You're going to have to sacrifice a piece of you in order to serve. And within the military, you're absolutely right. We do indoctrinate people. That is the entire point. That is so it is an accurate word. But the slight modification that I want to make on that is that it's not so much perfectionism. It is a standard. There is a standard, period. And so it's not about being perfect, it's about attaining the standard. So you know when you're going through basic and I'm mirror masked corporal and I'm screaming at you because you didn't fold your T shirt to be 10 inches by 10 inches, that's a simple detail. Right. How hard is it to fold a shirt, make it 10 inches by 10 inches square. I'm going to give you a picture. This is what it should look like. I'm going to give you all of the parameters that you need to meet in order to accomplish the task. Simple. But it's not because if you've never folded a shirt before, what do you mean, fold a shirt, right? That like it's. I remember going through lessons on how to lace your boots because the way in which I did it previous was wrong. This is the standard. And then you know, how to make your bed. This is the standard. How to use the machine gun. This is the standard. How to do anything. This is the standard. And that's the whole point of the indoctrination, is the fact that there are very specific guidelines as to how you need to live life. What doesn't get taught in the military very well, at least when I was going through, was the development of creativity within the guidelines. That's where I think people really struggle with this whole concept within the military. And to your point where you start to get the group think, where you start to get the complete indoctrinated. Well, this, you know, when I, I was talking earlier and I said the army sent me to this guy and I just went without questioning, without thinking that 100%. I was just in that. Whereas really what it is, what's more, what's more effective is to give someone a guideline, give some the standard and then allow them to come up with their own solution. Right? Instead of me saying, this is how you fold a shirt, specifically this way, if you can fold a shirt differently, that still ends up being 10 by 10 and looks exactly like cool, that that should be promoted, right? Like, absolutely, give her, have fun with that. But it's not really explained. And I think that's, that's the, the major difficulty is that yes, within a framework, it's good to, it's good to have a framework and live within that framework, but you have to have the ability to be creative within that framework to better it. As you said earlier, Olivia, you know, finding a way to change the mental framework to enjoy the difficulty or to put your enjoyment farther down in the future. So you're like, yeah, you can deal with the difficulty right now, but I know that I'm going to be better for it later. So, okay, I can manage this difficulty right now. But yeah, the indoctrinatedness, I don't know if that's a word, but yeah, that does definitely group think. And if you, if you look at the different tiers within the military. If you look at like general military, I think they're the tier three. Great soldiers can do a lot, but they are very regimented and there's very specific rules and this is the way you do it. And then you get into like tier two, which is, you know, Special Forces accoutrements like Bons and Coxins and things like that. People that, you know, assist special operators. Those guys have a lot more creativity. Their standards are, are even higher than the, the original ones, the original military ones, but they have more freedom. And then you look at tier one, you know, up in the special Operations and that kind of stuff, where the standards are even higher, but they have a lot more freedom to come up with their own solutions. So as you move upwards within the military or as you move even into leadership and things like that, that's where they start teaching that creativity, that creative thought and how to do this within the parameters. But you don't get it a lot when you first get in. It's just kind of like, shut up and do what I tell you, which is something you have to learn because you can't not do that when bullets are flying around. You have to be able to. When somebody tells you to do something, you go and off you go.

I was looking up some studies about how, I guess, general army, the big army, often has more instances of PTSD than Special Forces. And there's a number of reasons. And one that I just thought of now is like, you had just described the creativity, the rigidity of thinking, because you've got young men and women spending their formative years in, say, the big army, and being told, shut up and do it. And this is how, this is the standard, which is obviously extremely helpful for survival. But much like trauma responses, survival is very different than thriving. And that rigidity of thinking, does that carry over into life after the military? Because, yeah, you've spent your formative years just thinking that there is one way or that there is one standard and this is it. And yeah, let me give you an example.

I still have the army haircut. Still can't get like, I just. No, can't. Can't get it. And I've been out of the military since 2013, so like 11 plus years. And I don't think I'm ever going to get rid of that haircut because that just is the normal haircut for me now. And that's the way I'm going to go until I don't have any hair. Then, you know, be gone. But you're 100% right. The formative years create these sequences of events. And I know many, many, many veterans who have been out of the military for many, many, many years, who still have the same haircut, who still fold their bed the same way, who still tie their boots the same way because it is normal for them. But then I know a lot of guys also who. Sean's great one who just like, I'm going over there, like, it doesn't matter what the army told me. I'm going to do whatever the hell I want. But again, it's still within. It's within the mentality of what it is they're doing. And this is where I think a lot of veterans struggle consistently, especially with, you know, going to therapy or seeing a therapist or trying to change the way we think is that you're. You're taught not to change the way you think. You're taught specifically to listen to orders and do what you're told and follow the standard, and then everything will be okay. But afterwards, you just kind of like, now, now I'm. I'm out in the world. Similar to when you come out of, you know, Afghanistan. Coming into the world, you leave the military and you start looking at a civilian job and you're like, why? Like, what? I can't. Like, none of. None of this makes sense. My wife was telling me a story about that she works at the university here in Edmonton, and she was telling me a story like, since COVID some of the librarians have just not come back to work at all. They just work from our homes and that it itches my brain in a very bad way. Like, what do you mean not going to. They're still getting paid and like, yep, still getting paid. Like, how they're not at work. It doesn't make any sense. But for them, it makes perfect sense that they're not really needed at the university. There's no real point, like, to be there. They can do all the work from home. Cool. I mean, that makes sense to them, but it is super aggravating because we have this thing, these things that are driven into us, the work ethic, right? You show up, you work until the work's done. Somebody usually has to tell you to take a break, to eat when you're. When you're working within the military, things like that, where we have to. I was going to say, you know, sometimes you have to let go of the reins a little bit. Sometimes you have to let the horse do the work. And that's unfortunately as hard as we try to maintain a standard like, oh well, this is the way it works. Well, we have to understand that that's the way it works within the military, which is a very, very small, especially here in Canada. I was doing a little bit of math on this one and we have, this is a, probably, I'm on the high side here, maybe 500,000 serving and veteran in Canada out of 34 million people. Like we are a super, super tiny cross section of the country. In the States it's a little bit bigger because I think, yeah, actually, I think the percentage is actually lower because you have I think million plus standing, million plus veteran out of 350 million people. Like it's a, it's a pretty small number. Even though it's a larger amount, it's a pretty small percentage, I should say. But to try and take that military bearing and try and take that military lifestyle and say, oh well, I'm going to make this new office the military. No you're not. People, people aren't going to take that. There's a reason it's a volunteer army, but there are people like I know Sean who did this and still does it. He creates a special operations environment within, wherever he is. So he puts in the effort that is required of him by himself and he just kind of expects people to come along and if they don't, some bye bye. And then he just carries on doing whatever he's doing. So there is, there's, there's benefits and there's attractors to it. I mean you're gonna. Depends on what realm you want to get into. It's, it's a, it's a tricky subject, but we just don't do a good enough job within the community making sure everybody knows how to deal with it. That makes sense.

It brings to mind that I have one topic after this that I, I don't know if we'll have how much time we'll get into, but it's fairly big. So just a quick point would be becoming soft is probably a very real fear amongst veterans. And, and the notion of like, why the shit do I have to feel my feelings? What is the point of this? Why? If I let this standard go then everything's gonna fall apart. And I, I would love to hear.

There's a lot there. I'm gonna go off of my own experience on this one. When I got out of the military, I totally believe that, that, you know, the standard needs to be maintained and that if I let go of the standard, then the world's going to fall apart. If I start talking about how I'm feeling, then I will become a burden to the people around me because I don't want to feel it. So why would anybody else want to feel it? Right? Like that. That was the mindset at the time. And through all the work and through all the time and all the things that I've done and I've told the story a bunch of other times was the fact that my granddad was a combat engineer in World War II and he never talked about the war, not once that I ever heard directly. We'd catch snippets of, you know, random offhand comments and things like that. At one point, I think my brother found a, an Italian army issue knife at one point in the attic. We asked my granddad about it and he said the guy who had it didn't need it anymore. And we were like, okay, now he went 70 some odd years, right? I got back from Afghanistan, him and I sat down and we had a bit of a conversation and kind of talked about it. And for him, he finally had somebody else that got it right. Excellent. Somebody I can actually relate to. The sad part was, is that at one point during the war he was in France and they called for volunteers to move up to the front and he was working on a railroad somewhere and he didn't put his hand up in that call for volunteers. And because of that moment, he thought himself a coward for 70 plus years. Right. And that, that affected everything he did, affected how he managed, how he dealt with his kids, how he dealt with his wife, how he dealt with people. It colored that through that lens. And in that moment, I had been home from Afghanistan for maybe three or four weeks. That moment, to me stands out because I made a decision to say, I will never be that man. Not going to happen. And that's why when, you know, I finally saw a therapist, I was like, okay, I guess I have to see a therapist now. And I like, I just, I was so sure that the best way to do it would be to be as open and honest with how I'm feeling and what I'm going through as possible. But the army still, the army mentality is still in the back of your head. So it's still like, don't be a burden. You need, you need to be an asset. You need to constantly be working, you need to be constantly doing things. You need to be constantly trying to help people. You need to be. So the idea that, you know, I'll just keep taking the burden, I will Keep taking it on. I will keep taking on. That was very prevalent for many years. And it led to the fact that, you know, I was getting maybe, what is it, 12, 16 hours of sleep a week. And then, you know, like it was negatively affecting my health. Once I came to realize that I can still uphold a standard within myself. I can still do the best that I can for myself in every day. That makes me a better person, that makes me a better leader, makes me a better father, makes me a better husband, makes me a better jiu jitsu, or it makes me better at everything I do if I take care of myself. That realization took many years and it was a. It was, it. I think it has to be self realized because as much as I tell anybody else, man, take care of yourself, man. Just take care of yourself. It's. You still feel selfish by doing it. You know, when my back decides that I'm not going to work anymore and I have to lay on the couch and watch as my wife deals with my two boys who are like throwing themselves against the wall and jumping off of things and you know, being boys, I like it hurts inside. But I also know that if I try to get up and I try to do anything, I'm going to make myself worse, which means I'm going to be down for longer, which means she's going to have deal with that more. So I have to take care of myself. I have to engage that because, and I think this is the big shift in this is that we're not in combat. In combat, it is the mission. The men, then yourself. When you're in a combat zone, 100, the mission is the key. That will never change. Then it's your men after your men, then you get to deal with you. So if you don't eat when everybody else is eating, as a leader, cool. I can manage that later. But in life, you know, I want my kids to eat first. Excellent. My kids have eaten. Okay, now I can eat. But if I haven't eaten in three days, I'm not going to be a very good dad, am I? So I still need to take that time to eat, even though I have other things to do, even though my son doesn't have any socks on or my other kid is running around without pants, right? Sit down to eat, grab yourself coffee, whatever it is, take the time, make sure you're good to go, then you can move on. And it is a, it is a very big challenge to, to step away from that. But it is the realization is it's not A combat zone. So, like, it's a training. Look at it. Like a training zone. Okay, good. Everybody else take care of. Cool. Take care of yourself. Go from there. I hope that answers question. I think I went on a tangent.

No, that was fantastic. Olivia, if you have anything you'd like to add.

Yeah. And I know we're coming up on time, but just to kind of summarize, I think that's such a common feeling of, like, I can't burden people by talking about my feelings. As if it doesn't burden people to not. Because if we're not talking them, we're acting them out. Feelings don't just go away. There's two things they're going to do. They're going to external or they're going to go internal, Right. And if we just shove them down and bury them, we're going to be really numb, which means we're not going to be present with the people in our lives. And that's going to burden them, or we're going to act out at them, and then they're going to be scared of us or hurt by us or disconnected from us, and that's going to burden them. Right. So there's no way around it. It's the whole thing of, like, the hard is going to happen. The choice you have is what the hard is going to look like and how it's going to be long term. And I think for me, I spent so much of my life being, like, I have to be hard and tough, and that is the right thing to do. And I didn't realize for so long how much that was keeping me from. From the other people in my life and also harming them. Because, like you said, like, when you're trying to recreate a situation that you're no longer in, when you're trying to make your home life a combat zone, everyone is gonna get hurt, including yourself. But when you can say, I am capable of being soft here and I'm capable of turning the heart on when I need it, right? Like, it's not about, oh, I'm only soft now, but it's also not about, I'm always clenched and, like, ready and on alert, it's being able to shift from one to the other with relative ease so that you can respond to stimuli as they're happening and not alienate everyone in your life, which unfortunately, like, takes a really long time for people to.

There's a great analogy here in jiu jitsu, in that when you first start doing jiu jitsu, everybody is super rigid, like, arms extended. That's kind of what it's like when you first start therapy. Everything is at arm's reach. Everything is tense. Everything is, you know, it's. It's a catastrophe all of a sudden. But over time, you start to understand that, oh, well, I only need, you know, I only need a certain amount of tension here. Okay, well. And then slowly you start to go, whoa, whoa, do I even need tension there? What if I just kind of move out of the way? Oh, man, that just went right over top. You know, little things like that. And it allows you to. As you start to feel more, you're able to engage specifically where you need. Where you need to engage, rather than constantly trying to engage everything all at the same time at once. This brought up an interesting thought in my head, and I think I just watched. I've seen a couple. A video a couple times of. I think it's like Dana White, who's saying, like, I don't talk about my feelings. I'm a man, blah, blah, blah, blah. I thought it was ridiculous because it's just dumb. But this is the key thing that I think that most men don't understand, and I wanted to really harp on this because it just bubbled up in my head, is the fact that talking about your feelings is not what you think it is. It is not sobbing in a corner, say, I'm so sad. And no, that's not what it is. And it doesn't take it away. It doesn't remove it. And I think this comes from, you know, know when we're young and we're. We're hurt or we're crying and somebody says, no, you don't get to cry now. Or don't stop being a girl, or stop. Like, whatever it is, right? There's this imagery that comes along with feelings that most men are uncomfortable with because it. When we're young and we can't control our feelings, we don't know how to yet we get told that feelings are bad. We're like, oh, well, we just shouldn't feel anything. Oh, okay, well, that makes sense. Or we shouldn't talk about our feelings, shouldn't bring them up. We shouldn't allow people to see them. But the key is to just understand the feelings, to recognize that they're happening. It doesn't mean that you need to completely break down and fall apart and start, you know, wailing to the world. It's, man, I'm angry right now. Wait a second. Why am I angry? And then going down that rabbit Hole or you know, I'm really sad today. Recognize it? Okay, cool. Tell somebody. I'll tell my wife, I'll wake up and I'll be like, man, I'm. I'm not in a good place right now. And she'll be like, okay, and that's it. And then we'll go about it a day. That's what it is to talk about your feelings. It's not the, I guess even the media depiction of what it is to talk about your feelings where you completely break down and have a friggin meltdown. That's not what it is. It's just being aware and honest and clear. Because clarity, man. When I'm saying I'm in a not a good space and my wife looks at me and I'm like, I'm not a good space. And I'm really getting upset very quickly about a lot of things. She knows that. Okay, we're gonna try and smooth things out so that maybe we won't go over to whoever's place for dinner that night. Cool. But it doesn't affect the, the way in which I'm gonna be a father. Doesn't affect the. Or it does affect it, but it like by recognizing I can then engage life with a different lens rather than trying to fight it and be like, no, I'm not angry.

My unofficial mission in life is that how folks like military first responders, so on and so forth, reframe the way they view these things. So emotions. You saying, hey, I'm feeling this kind of way today. You're not telling your wife to fix it for me or what have you, but it. Is it akin to that you've made enemy contact, do you want to tell your teammates or do you go, this isn't happening. I'm not telling you what's going on. And then, oh, look, they got caught in, you know, they, they got hurt. And maybe it could be an interesting way of viewing it is just to tell them the situation because you have to. Part of the OODA loop is orient. How are they supposed to make decisions without.

I liken it to. I have this image in my head of like somebody gets shot in the leg or something like that. And then they, somebody goes, hey man, are you okay? And I'm fine. Right? Like, no, you're not. You're bleeding. I'm not bleeding. Go away. I don't want to talk to you. Right. It's that kind of mentality of just. You're. You're going to not deal with the issue. You're not going to let anybody else deal with the issue. You're not going to deal with the issue either. You're just going to sit there and bleed. What's the point of that? How is that going to help you or anybody? And to your point, Tanya, you know, when you get in contact, the first thing you say is contact, wait out. Or contact by the house 300 meters. Like, you start communicating immediately. There's a problem over there, let's go deal with it.

Versus, like, no. Well, the other town next over has way more insurgents, so I shouldn't deal with this.

Exactly. Yeah. My. The guys over in two one, they're getting shot at more than we are. Let's. Let's. Let's not. Because they're getting shot. Like, no, come on. Get your head out of your ass. It's just like the. But to your point, you're absolutely right. It. It is a. It is an injury like anything else. Right. If you don't say anything about it, nothing's going to happen. And I will say this is. That there is a. There's a time and place for everything. Right? Right. If. If you're having a. A meltdown and you're driving down the highway and your kids are in the back car, back seat, stop, pull over, have your meltdown, sort yourself out, carry on driving. You know, if you're working heavy equipment or whatever it is, I can come up with a million examples of just like, if you need to stop due to safety, stop. If you don't, don't. If you need to get through something and your emotions are getting in the way, shove them down for a few seconds, deal with the thing, come back to it afterwards. Why was I feeling that way? Oh, man, I was really angry there. I'm a big proponent of stoicism. Over the last couple years, I've been diving into the concepts of it. My initial concept of what stoicism was was that I had no emotions. I couldn't show emotions. I had to be stoic all the time. But what it really is, is just understanding your emotions, being curious as to where they come from, being thoughtful, being present, being in the moment. Why is this happening? It doesn't mean that you don't have emotions, doesn't mean that you get rid of your emotions. It just means that you are recognizing of them and you don't let them control your actions.

I don't want you doing 180 down the road to your other engagement. But if you wanted to talk about. If you just wanted to drop some Resources.

So there's working a number of things. We got tools for. The Toolbox is still up and running. It's on YouTube. It's on anything, Google, Apple, whatever. Some great conversations on there. Lots of really good information. So if anybody wants to listen to that, that's on there. You can find it. Tools for the Toolbox. And then we also have the Collective, which is the big one that we're working on right now. We have run episode 384, comes out today actually on. And then I don't know when this is going to be released, but there'll be lots more. There's also the gold mine and all that stuff. So you can find that. We're mostly on Instagram, but I am kind of all over the place. I have Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, X now everything.

How can they find you or the collective or whatever on Instagram?

Yeah, on. On Instagram is where, like I said, everything goes. So myself, I'm at Master Burls mcpl B U R L E S Everywhere else for the collective, it is the Underscore Collective. Underscore ig. And then all the links are on there. We also have the website at the Dash Collective CA. There's the YouTube page. The Collective. It's the underscore Collective. Underscore yt for YouTube. Tick Tock is the Collective with tt at the end of it and that kind of stuff. So we have all the links and stuff on the website or on the Instagram page. And by all means, there's lots of amazing information. I did a little bit of math again a little while ago. We're at 600 or correction, just over 700 guests total from last year. And we're still. Still going. Still going strong.

So, yeah, I mean it, I think so much, especially obviously as a society, like you said, like, men are often socialized to not feel their feelings. And so having someone who can attest to the functionality of it is really helpful. And you know, like you said, if you get shot in the leg and you do nothing about it, it's gonna fester and it's gonna get way worse than if you just like say, hey, I got shot. Can somebody help me? And then you get help and then hopefully you keep your leg. So, you know, thank you for doing the. The metaphor version of that and sharing all of that because it's really helpful for people to hear from you.

My pleasure. I. I enjoy talking about these things. Like I said, open and honest as I possibly can.

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