Helping Our Troops Help Themselves

June 12, 2012 - PRLog -- What do you do when military suicide deaths exceed war deaths?  The “obvious answer” is: get more mental health professionals for our troops.  

What about the stigma?  Troops see themselves as warriors.  They tend to think that they need to be strong, tough, and resilient.  They also feel they have to do it on their own and with the support of their team – not a therapist.  

Can you remove a stigma simply by command?  Or is it more deeply embedded than that?  Troops must rely upon one another in life-and-death situations.  They want to know they can count on one another.  

Many of them are rightly concerned that their teammates are ready for crisis.  They think, perhaps wrongly, that someone who feels badly enough to seek counseling might not be strong and resilient enough to handle the stress of combat.  Many decline to seek counseling because they're concerned about how it will feel to themselves and look to others.  Right or wrong, it is what it is.

The problem remains: How do you help the troops?  You help them by equipping them to help themselves and help one another.

Helping themselves fulfills their personal values as warriors.  Tools that help them increase their sense of strength, resilience, power, and self-control fits in with their identity as warriors.  Just as we train them in the skills to do their job, we also need to train them in the human skills to handle doing their jobs.

Among a key human skill is the Art of Letting Go.  As important as it is, rarely is anyone actually taught a concrete system for doing so.  Of course, we teach our military a great many skills not often found in the civilian population.  

For the military, this is a critical skill.  They must be able to enter civilian life where many of their reflexes that kept them alive in service to their country can be counter-productive.  They must shift their thinking to civilian thinking.  They must be able to let go of things that happened and things they did.

I has nothing to do with suicide.  It has everything to do with suicide.  For all troops, the skills are fundamental to their work.  It is fundamental to the civilian life to which they shall return.  For those who might reach the brink of suicidal thoughts, it is also the path back.

Combine such a key skill with other powerful techniques for even greater power.  Another challenge of everyone, military or otherwise, is staying sufficiently detached from the worst life throws at us to maintain professionalism.  

Treasure Hunting is one such skill.  It is finding the useful things even in terrible circumstances.  It is also the start of an incredibly powerful technique: Embrace, Elevate, Expand.

Getting a deeper understanding of emotion is key to so much human contact.  In modern days more than ever before, the military is simultaneously a fighting force and a diplomatic force.  They are the targets of political attack where they work.  Understanding emotion will help them handle those positions more effectively.

These skills also have the side effect of helping with suicide.  Suicide is often a reaction to acute pain and stress.  We often look things like depression.  However, there are sometimes no signs beforehand.  Something triggers pain, rage, or other intense emotion.  If they feel there is no way out, suicide has a certain “emotional logic” to it.  

A solid set of skills provide a way out.  It helps the troops do their job.  It will help them in their civilian lives.  And it can reduce suicide.

These particular skills are contained in the books Freedom Found, Above It All and Emotional IQ.  For more on the books, go to Amazon.com and search “Scot Conway” to see more.  

With one author/trainer knowing such a powerful set of skills, there must certainly be a wide variety of resources available to help our troops.  Conway has books and audios and he does live training as well.  Others also have books, audios, videos, and do live training.  With so many experts in these and related fields, the resources clearly exist.  This article explores just one possible solution from just one expert.

The military could invest in this sort of training and resources for active duty troops.  Even full retail for the books would cost less than $30 per member.  Even purchasing all three books at full retail for every individual active duty member would cost all of forty five million, or less than one-third of one F-22.  We already spend over $17,000 to equip on U.S. Solider.  Adding all three books would be an increase of 1/5th of 1% increase in the equipping budget.

Certainly at those kind of numbers, Conway or any other author or program director would happily provide steep discounts to help the troops.  The actual costs could be a fraction of that.  Conway, for instance, would happily surrender half or even three fourths of his profits to help our troops.

There are many options.  This is only one.  The Department of Defense knows there is a problem.  There are many possible solutions.  Investing tens of millions of dollars in mental health professionals might sound like the obvious way to solve the problem.  However, it inadequately respects existing realities in the warrior culture of the military.  A solution that honors the culture of the military must be found.

This is one possible solution that solves the suicide problem.  It solves that problem, enhances effectiveness, and empowers troops for civilian life later.  It is solutions like this that ought to be the Department of Defense list of possibilities.

Scot Conway may be contacted at Scot@MasterRevelation.com.  There is a great deal of his material that he already provides for very low cost and much of it is free.  Literally hundreds of hours of audio lessons are already available online.  He has hundreds of pages of articles, blogs and more online as well.  His resources can make a huge difference, and he has worked to make it accessible to all.

If not his material, then someone’s.  Something needs to be done.  What is being done now clearly is insufficient.