Notes ahead of the Summit: Cormac Doyle & Josh Goldberg (Illustrated)
On working with military veterans, first responders and "post-traumatic growth."
I’m writing from the train from Hamburg to Amsterdam with the second in a series of posts reflecting on interviews I’ve conducted for the Collective Trauma Summit 2023, which runs from September 26-October 4. You can register to watch the interviews for free during the 48 hours after they go online. Packages are available for lifetime access to talks by more than 60 speakers, along with poetry, music, guided practices and more. Please do join us for this incredibly inspiring event — it’s a big annual highlight for me, and a truly global resource.
“We must remember that one man is much the same as another, and that he is best who is trained in the severest school.” — Thucydides, as quoted in the gardens at Boulder Crest Foundation.
Resonant World #45
There’s no such thing as a “typical” guest at the Collective Trauma Summit 2023, and even if there was, Major (Rtd) Cormac Doyle wouldn’t be one of them.
I first met Cormac almost a decade ago, while researching my book Aftershock: Fighting War, Surviving Trauma, and Finding Peace, which documents the struggles of British military veterans and their families to heal from the psychological injuries of war.
A retired senior mental health manager in the British military, Cormac served a 25-year career spanning deployments including the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. He traces his career choice to a hospital stay during a bout of serious illness at 14, when the exceptional care he received from one individual inspired him to want to work with people. Cormac gravitated towards mental health nursing, and joined the military as a late entrant aged 26 — partly because of the better pay. Despite the rigours of undergoing basic training alongside 17-year-old recruits, Cormac realised: “I was born for this.”
Cormac had been remarkably candid to me about the limits of the trauma care the British military was able to provide — but he’d also recounted notable successes, including his work with a corporal who he’d treated for post-traumatic stress sustained in Iraq, using a technique known as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), an episode I wrote about in Aftershock.
It’s perhaps a reflection on my journalistic skills that it was only when I was preparing for our summit interview that I realised that Cormac had won the Associate Royal Red Cross — affectionately known as the “nurse’s Victoria Cross” — for exceptional services to military nursing, while deployed in Iraq. This had happened five years before we’d met, but Cormac had never mentioned receiving this highest of honours.
I wasn’t surprised, either, to learn that he’d had to postpone a trip to Buckingham Palace to receive the medal because he’d volunteered to go on another tour of Afghanistan. As protocol required, Cormac was eventually awarded the honor by the Queen.
Struggle Well
Though I’ve never served, I’ve spent time as a journalist embedded with U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I feel close to my military ancestors, including my grand-father Charles, and great-uncle Lionel. Cormac, who is Irish, had followed a very different path to many of the other summit guests — very few of whom, to my knowledge — have served in combat. That’s perhaps why I felt particularly honoured to welcome him into our circle. Whatever the rights and wrongs of any particular war, to my mind, Cormac’s presence was a fitting way to honor the countless soldiers who’ve been wounded in mind, body and spirit over the ages, and to acknowledge the importance of resolving the vast collective trauma fields that are both war’s consequence, and its cause.
I was delighted too when Josh Goldberg, chief executive officer of the Boulder Crest Foundation, a national nonprofit working with U.S. veterans and first responders in the police, corrections, emergency services and front-line healthcare system, accepted my invitation to join our conversation. I’d met Josh briefly in 2018, when he’d been on a visit to London, and I’d been immediately impressed at his obvious commitment to serving veterans and first responders. My appreciation deepened when I read Struggle Well: Thriving in the Aftermath of Trauma, a book Josh co-authored with Boulder Crest’s founder and chairman Ken Falke, himself a military veteran. Part of the book recounts Josh’s journey to find meaning after a crisis in his own life, and the unlikely path that led him from a high-flying corporate career to serve at Boulder Crest Foundation. (There is a Struggle Well podcast here).
“Post-traumatic Growth”
What came alive in our exchange was the desire we all shared to reframe narratives around trauma — moving beyond a medical model that, as Josh put it:
“asks people what they’re struggling with, and then works with them to make them feel less bad, and to help them better endure the suffering they’re experiencing. The implicit message, and the language we use is: ‘Get used to this new normal.’ And a ‘new normal’ is never good. It’s a recipe for hopelessness and despair.”
Both men were committed to creating the conditions for people to experience “post-traumatic-growth” — the idea that our hardest experiences can, if we receive the right support, transform into doorways to new ways of living, serving and relating.
I’m always wary of moving too quickly to the idea of post-traumatic growth, mindful that for people stuck in the depths of suffering, the concept can sound so far out of reach as to make them feel worse. But both Cormac and Josh were speaking from the experience of working with hundreds of men and women who’d made that journey.
Cormac said:
“We tell everybody they have a ‘disorder.’ I do challenge this with people I manage: Why do you refer to it as ‘my PTSD’, ‘my depression’, ‘my anxiety?’ You didn’t go out and buy it. You didn’t go out and say: ‘I want to welcome you into my life.’ And I say to the veterans who I treat — and I treat them very successfully: ‘It is your enemy. It is not your friend. But, from what you’ve been through, what have you learned?’”
Healing Communities
I also thought both men had a lot to teach about the power of healing communities, which fed directly into summit’s goal of supporting a global healing movement.
The Boulder Crest Foundation has retreat centres in Virginia and Arizona, and partners in another seven U.S. states, and more than 7,000 veterans and first responders, and other front-line personnel and family members, have gone through its various programmes, which foster mutual support through work in small groups. These include the Warrior PATHH, a 90-day programme for veterans starting with a seven-day intensive, and the Struggle Well Experience, a five-day training for first responders, among other offerings.
Josh told us:
“So, to us it starts with a simple question, and it’s: ‘Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard of PTSD?’ And everyone raises their hand. And then it’s: ‘Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard of post-traumatic growth?’ And one person raises their hand. We’re not saying that one replaces the other, but what we’re saying is, you can’t have one discussion without the other.
“The question is: Is someone going end up with a disorder where those symptoms become debilitating for an extended period of time? Or, are you going to get the chance to grow? If you don’t let people understand that growth is possible, they will not grow. You have to know it’s okay for good things to happen after really bad things. The start is breaking these blinders and this idea of new normals, managed diminishment, all of this stuff. Part of it is normalizing the struggle that’s a part of daily life. From there, from a post-traumatic growth perspective, the next thing you have to do is to build practices.”
Josh explained that these practices were divided into the domains of mind, body, finance and spirit (there are more details in his book Struggle Well):
“Even when you don’t want to go outside, you go outside. Even when you don’t want to go to the gym, you go to the gym. You’re building the capacity to bring to bear what you now know into your life. Because it’s the whole Viktor Frankl idea of: ‘In between stimulus and response, there’s a space, and in that space is the power to make choices.’ But when you’re really struggling, there’s no space. And so part of that space comes from being in a community, part of that space comes from breathing practices; meditation; walking; reading; listening to things; spending time with other people, is what creates that space.
“And from that place, you create the opportunity for people to start to share with you aspects of their life’s journey, which isn’t all negative. It’s them getting to share, how did you get here? And then, what did you learn from this experience? Because you’re still here, you survived a hundred percent of your worst days, you’re here. And then, making sense of that often provides breadcrumbs for where are we going next? And what we know in the journey of post-traumatic stress, [is that] true success is your willingness and ability to help guide others through that same process, because you’ve walked that path. So what I love about it [is that] it’s an inherently democratic process.
“It’s: ‘We don’t do this because it helps us feel better, we do this because it allows us to significantly impact the people that we care about. And we know for these communities, that’s their driving force.”
Josh added:
“The way I like to think about what we’re doing is that, I’m not trying to run an organization, I’m trying to catalyze a movement. And a movement to help people regain hope in their life, because with hope comes a sense of agency, a belief that their actions can create change. And then comes a sense of direction, this idea of getting unstuck and starting to walk forward and move forward.”
“Reignite the Fire”
Since leaving the military, Cormac has set up a charity called the The Bridge, which provides specialist psychotherapeutic care to those who’ve served in the armed forces, their family and dependents. With a colleague, he’s also established a clinic in Bulgaria to offer bespoke one-to-one trauma therapy, called The Serenity Project.1
Cormac extended this invitation to anyone working through their own journey of trauma integration:
“Find something that helps you along your pathway, at the same time, be humble enough to remember that whatever you learn about your recovery that has made that one difference to your life, tell the world about it. Because even if you only touch one life, you may well stop one person from committing suicide.”
I’ll leave last word to Cormac, whose work to help a client rethink the idea of “burnout” seemed to sum up both men’s philosophy.
As Cormac recalled:
“And then we looked at the whole concept of burnout and trauma, and I said, ‘Look, here’s the good thing about using the terminology “burnout”: that means you were on fire at some stage, we’re just going to reignite the fire again.’ Because if you burn out, there’s always something there. If you’re breathing, there’s some ember there somewhere, and we’re just going to gently get that to grow.”
Our conversation goes live on Tuesday, October 3, and you can watch it for free for 48 hours. Packages are available to buy for lifetime access to the entire summit.
Note: I have lightly edited some of the quotes from the interview for clarity.
Maj (Rtd) Cormac Doyle Biography
Cormac Doyle trained as a Registered Nurse Mental Health in Dublin, Ireland, and has completed 25 years of military service, serving in both the British Royal Air Force and the British Army. He is a qualified Flight Nurse and has worked at the command level within the Royal Air Force and the Army. He has developed a service for veterans’ mental health, which he self-funds. His particular area of interest is the assessment, management, and treatment of stress reactions, PTSD and CPTSD. He created UltraBLS/VRT as an enhanced intervention based on EMDR, constructive conversation, progressive relation, client self-development, and human performance. With a colleague he has opened a one-to-one bespoke psychological trauma mental health retreat in Bulgaria – The Serenity Project.
Josh Goldberg Biography
Josh is the CEO of the Boulder Crest Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring first responders, combat veterans, and their family members live great lives in the midst of struggle, stress, and trauma. Along with Boulder Crest’s Founder and Chairman, Ken Falke, he co-authored Struggle Well: Thriving in the Aftermath of Trauma. Josh and Ken co-authored Transformed by Trauma: Stories of Posttraumatic Growth alongside Dr. Richard Tedeschi and Dr. Bret Moore. In 2017, Josh was named one of 60 Presidential Leadership Scholars.
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