164: Part I, Courtney Mulhern and Dan Joseph on the book "Backpack to Rucksack"

Today, Courtney Mulhern interviews Dan Joseph, Author of the Combat Psych website and the book Backpack to Rucksack: Insight Into Leadership and Resilience From Military Experts. 

His articles and tools are to help soldiers and families build mental fitness and overcome past trauma so that they can live healthier / happier lives. 

As you know from Courtney Mulhern's episode, she is a practicing therapist and a terrific interviewer, so I put the two together for this episode.

Dan Joseph's info:

https://combatpsych.com

"Backpack to Rucksack: Insight Into Leadership and Resilience From Military Experts": 
https://www.amazon.com/Backpack-Rucksack-Leadership-Resilience-Military

Website "Combat Psych" where you can find more information about him and the things he's working on: https://www.combatpsych.com

Instagram: @mhen2.mentalhealth

One CA is a product of the civil affairs association 

and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of US foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail dot com

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

Special Thanks to Amr Diab for the song and album "Amarain." 
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6RC2T3Q7rs

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Transcript for Episode I&II

00:00:00    Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. Contact the show. Email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org. I'll have those in the show notes. Okay, testing.

00:00:37    COURTNEY MULHURN
Can you hear me, Dan?

00:00:38    DANNY JOSEPH
Yes, loud and clear. Today, Courtney Mulhern interviews Dan Joseph, author of the Combat Psych website and the book Backpack to Rucksack, Insight into Leadership and Resilience for Military Experts. His articles and tools are to help soldiers and their families build mental fitness and overcome past trauma so that they can live healthier, happier lives. As you know from Courtney Mulhern's episode, she's a practicing therapist and a terrific interviewer. So I put the two together for this episode. This is part one of two. I'll have a link to his site in the show notes. So back to Courtney.

00:01:14    COURTNEY MULHURN
Hi, Dan, and welcome to the 1CA podcast.

00:01:17    DANNY JOSEPH
Thanks for having me. Yes,

00:01:18    COURTNEY MULHURN
we've got a lot to talk about today. Looks like you've been very busy with several books out now and still more coming. So I want to talk to you about all of that. But before we get into that, I just want to hear a little bit about your military service.

00:01:33    DANNY JOSEPH
Yeah, I was a combat engineer, training folks to go deploy, and was a platoon leader. Got to spend a lot of time with the Joes out in the field. And it was a short contract. I was only in for three and a half years. And I'm out now, but definitely I'm looking at rejoining in other capacities.

00:01:53    COURTNEY MULHURN
Okay. So kind of moving into your writing process, just kind of curious how you got into writing.

00:02:01    DANNY JOSEPH
So the main crux of it was getting out of the military, trying to fit in society and realizing I was totally different. I changed in a big way that I didn't expect. It was quite subtle, to be honest. And I joined old. I joined at 32. So a lot of my buddies were 18, 19 when I met them. So I had to go through basic training before OCS. And so mental health was a big issue due to COVID. I was in the military during the lockdowns. I had a soldier survive his suicide attempt. Another friend of mine lost 13 men from his unit to suicide after Afghanistan, which is crazy, crazy numbers. I'm shoppable. I need to think about. And so when I got out, I just wanted to make sense of what was going on. What I felt as points of friction with my identity and who I was, I also wanted to apply, because I'm a big nerd, aspects of neurophysiology to the concept of being a leader in the military. What that means in an environment where your sympathetic response and their sympathetic response are constantly triggering on and off due to high intensity, high urgency, combat experience, things of that sort. Working with a lot of combat veterans. I witnessed the weight that they carried. And it just begged the question, how does a military leader stay tactically aggressive and at the same time show consideration and care and love for the men and women who are in their platoon, in their unit, who potentially are struggling with invisible weight? And so it's just one big constellation of variables. There's so many moving parts. So writing was just my way of kind of trying to process all this.

00:03:39    COURTNEY MULHURN
So where does one even start? How do you start to organize the thoughts pen to paper?

00:03:45    DANNY JOSEPH
So my first book was a journal entry that turned into like 400 pages. When I got out, I thought about my soldier, Cody. He wrote the introduction to the book. The foreword was written by Austin, who lost 13 of his men. And I started journaling on what could be done to help those who are hurting and struggling with depression, with suicidality, with difficult feelings. So I started a journal entry about the neurobiology that underlies chronic depression. So it was kind of like this dual process of what does my gut tell me? And then what does the science tell me? And I was trying to make sense of this. And all of a sudden I realized, hey, this is an interesting dualistic process here. So I'm looking at warm, fuzzy feelings. And then I'm looking at hardcore functional MRIs and brain scans and all that. And I wanted to marry the two. And then that turned into multiple pages. And then I thought, well, I could write about another soldier right now that I know. I could write about a Marine that I met and an airman and a Navy rescue swimmer, a Navy EOD. And so I started piecing together kind of this crumb trail of service members who inspired me and touched my life even before I joined the military. And this book came out with a little nuggets of advice that hopefully will help. Incoming leaders, especially junior officers, have a special kind of consideration for the nuanced variables of being a leader.

00:05:14    COURTNEY MULHURN
So then Backpack to Rucksack. So was there anything specific that made you want to focus your thoughts into this book? Or how did this one start?

00:05:27    DANNY JOSEPH
So yeah, this one started as the journal entries. And then I created the Combat Psych Handbook as a boiled down version of it. And I gear it specifically towards men because men tend to have less emotional vocabulary and they're much more inclined if you look at the rates of suicidality and successful suicides. It's way higher. I think it's four to one when it comes to men. And so there's just such a stigma on talking about feelings and discussing things. And so I wanted to give the troops some really, really boiled down lists of thoughts and phrases, self -talk, journal prompts. and just variations on how to describe their feelings, how to understand their feelings, and why it doesn't mean that they're weak because they experience very inconvenient feelings at times. Again, it goes down to the neurocircuitry of the brain. So that was a distilled version of Backpack to Rucksack.

00:06:21    COURTNEY MULHURN
I like how you organize the chapters. So you kind of give keywords at the beginning that will be discussed throughout the chapter with some definitions, and then an introduction, how to be a good... military leader, the psychological application, and then leadership advice?

00:06:38    DANNY JOSEPH
While I was in the Army, during the lockdowns, things got slow, right? A lot of the pipelines were shut down. So Ranger School, Airborne, Aerosol, everything was just on hold. And so I thought, and what do I do in an indefinite amount of time? And I thought, well, Army offers tuition assistance. So I started an online organizational psychology degree. And what I loved about getting a master's in org psych is that There's no necessarily right or wrong answer when you give a prompt to the professor, but you need to back it up with peer -reviewed journal citations. And so I started looking at terms and definitions and ideas and concepts in the world of psychology, but based on peer -reviewed journals. So there's a community of researchers that agree or disagree on certain things. And so I kind of brought that muscle memory into this book. And so I wanted to offer terms that basically provide a sense of objectivity. that I'm not just talking about my feelings and my perspective. Yes, a lot of the book reflects that for sure. But I also wanted to inject some objective truth that regardless of my biases, I wanted to mitigate that as much as possible. So I thought, let me add some of the words, the definitions, let me add some journal citations and give credit to researchers who did the science and then expand on that.

00:07:58    COURTNEY MULHURN
Definitely. And throughout this book, you discuss many of your relationships and with just other service members both peers friends and mentors as a part of your research so what was that like talking to different service men and women and hearing their stories and and just making them a part of this book a lot of these people molded me before i joined and while i was in i had my own issues growing up i had my own experiences and

00:08:20    DANNY JOSEPH
lot of these people molded me before i joined and while i was in i had my own issues growing up i had my own experiences and I was not in a healthy lifestyle before I joined and was asking myself existentially who I want to be in this world. I started meeting service members. I met some awesome Navy SEALs here at San Diego, started working out with them. I started meeting EODs who were coming back and forth from multiple deployments back to back in Afghanistan. I started having these conversations with people who were my demographic, my age range and all that, but they were doing some things in their lives that I just couldn't even wrap my head around. I saw their self -discipline. I saw their humility. I saw how focused they were and that they weren't doing horrible things with their lives like me and my friends were doing. And that rubbed off on me. I wanted to emulate that. And so this book is kind of a journey through all the different people who mentored me through the way they behaved, just observing them and seeing the qualities that they had. And yeah, I didn't have a great relationship with my father. And so especially for me, meeting male mentors was really cool to just understand what healthy masculinity looked like. And jujitsu played a big role in that as well. Getting me to just break my own ego or having black belts on the mats break my ego for me and allow me to reconstruct it in a healthy way. Just knock down my pride. I needed that. And then some of my sisters in arms showed me kind of their side of it too, what it was like being in the military with certain issues that they were facing. It was a family, you know, and so we all kind of bonded together. It was just cool identifying as service members wanting to strengthen America. And that was the overarching relationship that we had with each other. And anything else that we brought to the table, regardless of race, gender, any ideologies that we had, we just together in uniform, you know, we all needed to work together and that was it.

00:10:25    COURTNEY MULHURN
Absolutely. So how were you able to network across different branches and ranks? Like if there are units out there, you know, it's important. We're all brothers and sisters in this. So how would you suggest to network with each other?

00:10:40    DANNY JOSEPH
One big thing was jujitsu gyms. I guess fight houses. So if you do MMA, jujitsu, Muay Thai, things of that sort, you know, CrossFit, go to a gym where you meet people with uniforms, right? So you meet. all these different service members who are driven, who are motivated, who are making healthy decisions with their minds, their bodies. And that's a way to connect. I met a lot through like groups groups and men's groups and things like that, where I was intentionally seeking mentorship and just kind of spiritual guiding as well. And then honestly, just having, having conversations with people from whether you go to MEPS and you're joining, you just talk to the people left or right of you, or if you're at a D shock at a dining facility, I mean, Having that openness to just talk to people like they're people, regardless of rig. And I noticed that just the more relaxed someone is in approaching others in uniform, you allow them to relax as well. And you can have these awesome discussions. And one thing that was so cool was I'd be working with a soldier, let's say a senior NCO, who's fairly reserved. And then I would just ask them a question. Hey, so how long have you been in? Where have you deployed? what's your take on things going on right now and we would talk about what they experienced in combat like things would come up that they'd want to share voluntarily it was just so cool to know that they did these things for our country and they weren't looking for the limelight or anything by just validating that and asking them to share some wisdom you know i'm a new officer tell me something that i don't know that you know that you learned in war that you wanted them and you just see them light up And say, yeah, you know what, when it comes to this, this should be your focus. So these are your priorities. This is how you care for people. And then it would just blossom into these discussions where you realize you're talking to the smartest person in the room and they're also the quietest. They're the most reserved. I love that. You know, I'm just naturally curious about people's inner world and what makes them tick. I love that because in the military, it's so easy to look at somebody as rank or just see what tabs they have. But when you really get to know them. And you know the sacrifice that they've experienced or the childhood they experienced. That was huge too. So I'd have soldiers in my platoon who grew up in ghettos in Chicago. And it was common that people, young teenagers, had to carry weapons on them just to make it to school. Knock it, mom. They come to work. They can shave in. They got things together. It's all good, right? Then you find out what they're going to go home to on the holidays or the stuff that they're struggling with or the stuff their families go going through that they've escaped because they joined the military. These are all sorts of things that just really make your culture in the military so rich, but it often goes unappreciated and unknown.

00:13:25    COURTNEY MULHURN
Yeah. And we're more than just the job or whatever we're called to do. And everyone's got a story to tell. So I think that's great to stay curious and find that common activity or whatever, just to kind of engage in conversations with each other. I think that's really important. So I'm glad that you highlight that in the book. At different times in your life, in different situations, sometimes you needed compassion to kind of get you through it. Other times you needed a bit of a tough love approach. And I think it's kind of just in regards to leadership. It kind of shows that not one size fits all. You can't be just tough love the entire time for that specific person. And I think that was just kind of my takeaway that we just have to stay authentic to who we are and stay consistent in that and for whoever we're leading. So I just thought that was great that you took different things from different people, different leadership styles.

00:14:18    DANNY JOSEPH
Yeah, it's just frustrating. It's frustrating when somebody doesn't put any effort to kind of customize their approach to different people, unless they be inauthentic or necessarily shift too much in how you address people. But just understanding that everyone has different motivations, whether it's intrinsic motivational factors and extrinsic motivational factors, and knowing how to inspire people is... It's tough to do. It takes a little bit of thought. In psychology, they talk about a transformational leader versus a transactional leader. And transformational leaders, they reach inside somebody and pull something out. Or at least they enable that concept within them. And it's really, really inspiring to see that. Because you're not forcing someone to do the job. They're genuinely fired up about it. And then transactional leadership is, you will do the job, and then I will pay you to the job, and that's it. But there's a time and place for all this stuff. And leadership in itself is complicated enough. Just being a manager at a company is complicated enough, let alone an environment where things can become lethal very quickly. This stuff is not to be taken lightly.

00:15:22    COURTNEY MULHURN
And so how do leaders motivate others to dig deeper into that mental toughness and resilience? Like what should we be doing now and how to motivate people that just aren't quite there yet?

00:15:36    DANNY JOSEPH
So just from what I experienced with the soldiers in my platoon, and this is like such a prickly discussion to have, but giving autonomy to soldiers within reason is great to get them motivated. A lot of these folks are moms and dads by the time they join, even though they're so young, you know, you look at them and they're married, they've got families that they're running. So when they take a job in the military, they don't want to feel like they're being treated as children. And so to let them know, I will give you adult responsibility. I'll treat you like an adult until you prove otherwise. And I'll give them those left to right limits and grant them that autonomy to go execute. And that really motivates them. I'd ask them, what are your hobbies? What are your interests? What are your goals after the military? Whether it's in a year, whether it's in a couple of decades. And then just letting them know there's tuition assistance. There's an educational center. There's ways to start investing in yourself. as a human being outside of uniform. And they love that stuff because that proves that I'm looking at them as more than just a soldier doing a soldier's job in a very specific capacity. And by the way, the healthier that somebody is holistically, they're going to be healthier in uniform. So if we work on their resilience, if we work on their self -care, self -enrichment, education, their knowledge, it's going to translate at work. They're going to be more present. There'll be less safety issues. There'll be less mistakes. There'll be more rested. And when the op tempo gets insane, there'll be more recharged for those aspects as well. It'll avoid burnout. Again, looking at the neurochemistry of the brain, the more we tax these service members, our service members, the less resources they have cognitively to function. So yes, tough love does work, but it needs to be followed with rest. It needs to be followed with self -care. There has to be a regenerative aspect to that where they can recharge their battery and whatever tough love we experience. Like for me, if I get pummeled in jujitsu on the mats, I get absolutely crushed by my training partner. I get to go home and rest and then come back to the mats healthy to get crushed again. But if I get crushed back to back, get that tough love on the mats back to back, I will get injured. The inflammation is going to accumulate and I'll be injured. And then guess what? I can't train for six months. So that's what I want to see more than military self -care and letting people have not necessarily just downtime, but there's various ways to throttle down the stress. And that's to promote longevity, by the way.

00:18:08    COURTNEY MULHURN
Right. And I think it kind of goes along the lines of getting to know your soldier too, because everyone's going to obviously have different needs. But if you just get to know them and directly ask them what works well for you and what do you need? I think that. really probably goes a long way as well.

00:18:26    DANNY JOSEPH
Yep. I know there's a time and place where we have to simulate war. Right. Right. And so we can't ask that because it's not applicable in that scenario. But letting them know that is awesome. Again, identifying that, just labeling that lets them know, well, there will be an end to this. Deployments last so long. War lasts so long. And to just remind them that things are going to suck for a period. It's going to be tough. But that doesn't mean that we have to stop looking at our future goals. Because once you lose hope, things get dark pretty fast. And that's where mental health issues really become aggravated. But to let the soldiers know, and this isn't permanent, there will be a point where you are going to get rest. You are going to get downtime. You are going to get vacation days, whatever it is. And help them plan for that. And help them feel supported in the relationships around them. And that's what we do best in the military. When we're in an austere training environment. When we have to embrace the suck, we do it together. So it galvanizes our relationships as brothers and sisters in arms. And so to foster those type of discussions is huge. To put the focus on that. But some leaders won't do that. I've witnessed it where some leaders just focus on how hard things are going to be and how terrible things are going to be. End of discussion. But then you see these leaders who acknowledge, hey, this is tough. But guess what? Look out for those next to you. Because... We are all we have in this environment. And those are really inspiring briefs to get because it reminds us why we signed that contract. But a lot of that has to do with that trickle -down effect from the Canadian climate.

00:20:02    DANNY JOSEPH
That's the end of part one. We'll see you next week for part two of Courtney Mulhern and Dan Joseph. Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe and read the show on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an episode, Email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. And now, most importantly, to those currently out in the field, working with a partner nation's people or leadership to forward U .S. relations, thank you all for what you're doing. This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great episodes, One CA Podcast.

 

00:00:00    DANNY JOSEPH

Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. Contact the show. Email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. Or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes.

 

00:00:35    DANNY JOSEPH

Today, Courtney Mulhern interviews Dan Joseph, author of the Combat Psych website and the book Backpack to Rucksack, Insight into Leadership and Resilience for Military Experts. His articles and tools are to help soldiers and their families build mental fitness and overcome past trauma so that they can live healthier, happier lives. As you know from Courtney Mulhern's episode, she's a practicing therapist and a terrific interviewer. So I put the two together for this episode. This is part two. I'll have a link to his site in the show notes. So back to Courtney.

 

00:01:10    DANNY JOSEPH

Talks like that from your leadership alleviates some of that stress and anxiety put on maybe some younger folks that don't have super high resiliency quite yet because they're younger and they're still working on it. So to hear that from leaders, I think that's really great. And that kind of goes in line with your next book, The Combat Psych Handbook. It's a bit less narrative, and it has just more practical examples, evoking more dialogue. Tell us a little bit more about your thoughts behind writing this handbook.

 

00:01:39    COURTNEY MULHURN

Yeah, so Tammy Pulaski wrote the foreword to the book. It's dedicated to her son, Jeremiah. Essentially, what Tammy said was, if she had known how to describe his feelings, maybe he'd still be alive today. I asked her to write the foreword to the book because what he experienced after war, not understanding how to process the weight that he felt. But there was a lot of what my soldiers still struggle with, even necessarily just from war, from a variety of issues, but how much more so for the service members who have been in war. And so I wanted to give a very quick, streamlined approach. Almost like a break glass in case of emergency type words. Hey, I got the stuff that's stuck inside of me. I don't know what it is. So they could flip through the chapters. And it's supposed to be like a kind of a diagnostic. Like, hey, what are you struggling with? Look at the chapters. They're actually alphabetical A through Z. It's like the first chapters about anxiety, aggression, avoidance, assertion. There's specific prompts that deal with how the brain is processing any one of these circumstances. And I specifically wanted to give these troops the phrases that they may not even know are occurring within their minds subconsciously. Because in psychology, there's something called the aha moment. And you can't fabricate that. It's a resolution to cognitive dissonance. It's internal conflict that exists that we try to self -medicate. Once you realize the truth of what's causing that, it's this instantaneous kind of release of pressure. Just this big breath of like, oh, that's what it was, right? That's what I was struggling with. It's because this person said this and it reminded me of when this other person said that. All these different subconscious variables. And so all this to say, again, thinking about Jeremiah's story, how we lost him as a soldier and his mom is now a gold star mom. It's just heartbreaking. And so I want to help shatter that paradigm. and let them know your feelings are valid, your feelings have a neurological basis, they are worth looking at. And it's something that I struggled with personally, to be totally transparent with you. When I was self -medicating, I didn't know the trauma experience. Jiu -jitsu brought it out of me. I started having flashbacks on the mats. I started having panic attacks. I started having the freeze response, the flight response. Technical words inside of my head telling me I'm worthless and that things got really dark. Self -medication was all I could do to numb myself out. And then I realized how powerful psychology was in understanding all this. And again, when we look at the military, look at how much care we put into our vehicles and the weapon systems just to keep things going. So let's do some brain maintenance.

 

00:04:37    DANNY JOSEPH

Yeah, absolutely. I see a lot of topics in this handbook, the A to Z, but are not typically fun. Words associated with like shame or depression or fear and ego, it doesn't elicit a very comfortable response when you think about these words. But I also think that's the point. Words do have that stigma or feelings associated with them. But I think if we normalize these topics and make them more comfortable, the more we talk about them, we can find the words like you were saying to what these look like. I think that's a takeaway is to just get more comfortable with really heavy topics if we want to move forward within ourselves and the military.

 

00:05:24    COURTNEY MULHURN

Definitely. You know, I was talking to one of my soldiers from my platoon about how a lot of people were self -medicating. That's alcohol consumption for one thing. I like to ask the question, what are you drinking? And there's a reason behind it. And oftentimes, unfortunately, we don't know. People don't understand. I mean, I'm tense. I'm stressed. And so I got to decompress. Plopting into the specifics, let's ask the whys. What's stressing them out? Why is it an issue? Why the volatility? And oftentimes what we experience in present day reaches back to a past experience that we had.

 

00:05:59    COURTNEY MULHURN

That's not something most people will just voluntarily want to do. And I understand that. But again, this book is... Free on the website. The entire PDF is totally free because I want them to have a resource to flip through and start to work on things. Because what's cool about the brain, if you look at it as sort of a selective algorithm, something is going to pop out viscerally. They'll have a reaction to it. So a word or phrase like shame or fear or maladaptive behaviors or whatever it is, depending on their linguistic strengths or whatnot. I want to create a book where they can guide themselves through their feelings as much as possible. And especially because not a lot of service members want to go to behavioral health. Not a lot of combat veterans want to disclose to psychologists things that they experience. And I know that firsthand through people have told me that there's things they wanted to discuss that they've never shared with anybody. And if you get critical,

 

00:07:02    COURTNEY MULHURN

you get critical, if they have a flashback or if they fall into a depressive cycle, they will need professional help. At least let's get them open to that privately. So if they read a book like this privately, and they acknowledge, yep, I've got some issues, my marriage is falling apart, I'm doing this to my spouse, I'm talking like this to my children, or this is the phrase that always pops in my head when I look at my reflection in the mirror, then give them those words, and then maybe they could begin to seek counsel to work on themselves.

 

00:07:31    DANNY JOSEPH

Yeah, and I was even thinking, I just have really good practical examples on here that would do really well in small group discussions. I was thinking on a drill weekend for us in the reserve, facilitating some of these discussions. This is just a really great resource to have. I am a social worker on the civilian side and just a big fan of small group settings, big fan of AA, NA. I just think there's a huge power in a group and sharing on a topic that's not normally discussed in normal conversation. So I think just facilitating discussions as a leader, I think is really important. And this is just a great resource to have.

 

00:08:07    COURTNEY MULHURN

Thanks. That's kind of the dream that I have is just seeing these discussions happen. And again, it's not about the right or wrong answer here. It's about the talks.

 

00:08:18    DANNY JOSEPH

Yeah. And I think it's about the process too. It's not just the right answer or it's not like a one answer will solve everything. It's the process. And like you said, A word might stick out and somebody might relate to that and be willing to share. And that might speak to another person in the group. So big fan of that. And then moving on to your third book, The Black Belt Mindset, Mastering Anxiety Through the Power of Breath. What was the inspiration behind this book?

 

00:08:43    COURTNEY MULHURN

So when I was in the Army working on my master's degree, I was prompted by one of the professors to basically structure a psychology study. And not actually do the study, not conduct it, but just structure one. So I chose jujitsu and anxiety management because, again, I have the flashbacks and all my issues on the mats and jujitsu. So I was like, let me study the psychology of what martial arts does to the human brain. And that blew up into a 32 black belt study that I just asked about sports and how psychology is impacted by anxiety and what they experience physiologically, how they need breath control or don't use breath control. So I studied the black belts who analyze threats in a way different way. It's so different than what a normal human would look at a threat. So you grab the throat of a black belt. They're not looking at it as, oh my gosh, I'm in trouble. The black belt will look at a hand approaching their throat as points of leverage, points of distance, and modifying somebody's face and their center of gravity in order to throw them. bend their arm a certain way to either break it or to get past that. And so they are able to appraise the situation differently. And therefore, they're able to self -regulate and they're able to self -seed. They're able to down -regulate their limbic response, their amygdala. They're able to trigger a calm,

 

00:10:09    COURTNEY MULHURN

a sense of calm amidst chaos. So this book goes through kind of my interview process, what these black belts told me about what they experienced. psychologically and emotionally, and just lessons learned that I wanted to apply.

 

00:10:22    DANNY JOSEPH

So how would you say Jiu -Jitsu is beneficial to service members, or what are some parallels that go alongside having a discipline like that as it relates to leadership in the military? So it goes back to one story I learned in OCS.

 

00:10:36    COURTNEY MULHURN

goes back to one story I learned in OCS. We heard this story from an EOD, and he told us how there was an IED that exploded and took out multiple vehicles. There were some service members who were injured, and some of them were dying, and the medic rushed to the scene, and in front of this EOD, who was attempting to minimize any further casualties, the medic began to panic. And when the medic started to panic, the soldiers were looking at the medic, and they were starting to panic. So this EOD ran up to the medic, grabbed him, and said, listen, you need to take a breath, you need to calm down, and you need to try to save these people. Do your job, you know what to do. But he said, everyone's looking at you. If you freak out, everyone's going to freak out. So I need you to be here right now and do what you can. And right then the medic got back to the present moment and began to execute and save lives. And so EOD told us as junior officers to understand that both calm is contagious and panic as well. So be the person who induces a sense of calm in the unit. Now in jujitsu, when I'm getting choked out or I'm getting smothered, by one of the upper belt men and they're just absolutely crushing me. If I begin to panic, I will hyperventilate and I will lack the ability to survive that round. The more I breathe chaotically, the less air I'm taking in efficiently. My diaphragm isn't getting activated. Everything is on the upper chest. I'm not getting oxygen in my blood because I'm getting smothered. And so what I'm taught by my coaches, my instructors on the mats is to just slow down that breath rate. diaphragmatic breathing, calm down, and then that'll switch on my prefrontal cortex. The science shows this in the functional MRIs and whatnot. When the prefrontal cortex switches back on, I will jump back into a higher brain functioning where I can think about the sequence of moves that I need to execute to change the situation. What variables can I control? What can I do with my body to defend myself and to work to move? and to stay oxygenated so I don't pass out or black out or get choked out or whatever the issue is. And the more I can calm myself down on the mats, the more I can calm myself down in traffic. Or when as a platoon leader, I'm in the field and a vehicle breaks down and it's 125 degrees and everyone's freaking out because we're not making it to the grid corner that we need to be at. Take that breath, calm myself down, and then the troops around me will see that and they calm down. If I'm freaking out and I'm anxious, well, my sparring partner is going to feel that. My soldiers are going to feel that. And so this is philosophical wisdom that applies to your whole life.

 

00:13:16    DANNY JOSEPH

It sounds just like a different level of awareness, too. You talk a lot about self -awareness, and you basically have to be in that scenario. You talk a lot about mindfulness in terms of mental health and resilience, and you have to be in the moment if you're actively engaging with somebody. I definitely see that benefit to jujitsu. So where would someone even start?

 

00:13:42    COURTNEY MULHURN

Some people could just walk into a gym and start sparring and they're good to go. For me, it was a very awkward start with a friend of mine from high school who graciously brought me to his gym after hours and helped me get through the fear and trepidation there. And then that tribal family grew out of that. But yeah, starting with breath control, starting with yoga, starting with... whatever it is to kind of gain presence in the body. And it really depends on what people have experienced. There needs to be a special consideration for a very close -knit, trusted group around you. And you just tell people, hey, you know what? I got some weird physiological responses. I got a free response that I'm trying to get through. Can you help me on the mat? So then you find a coach or somebody that says, yes, I will. I will talk to you about your breath awareness. I will remind you to breathe. Literally, I don't have training orders. They'll be like, hey, buddy, I need you to breathe. You got to remember to breathe. And I'm like, oh, okay, that's why I was panicking. But again, when somebody suffers abuse at a younger age, they go into a rage and freeze response because they can escape the situation. And same with combat. We're talking about veterans at PTS, and they get on the mats, and they go through a flashback on the mats. It's going to get weird for them to ask. but to let them know we can discuss it, we can talk about it. I'd say fighting coaches and combat veteran. That really helped me a lot. I rolled with several combat vets. So there was nothing that I would bring to the table that would surprise them. They've been through it, they've worked through it, they've battled through it. And I would love to see each other grew because of that. That was the biggest game changer for me.

 

00:15:19    DANNY JOSEPH

It's really powerful that, like you mentioned, with your trauma, To use something positive to address it head on and take yourself back to a vulnerable spot, but in a safe environment with people you trust and respect, I think that's really powerful to heal.

 

00:15:38    COURTNEY MULHURN

Yeah, it's called exposure therapy. And it's very important to throttle it accordingly. Because I overdid it at times and got into panic attacks because I didn't know what it was. Once I found out what it was, I could tell my buddies. Different dudes that I got to roll with where I got to tell them, hey, man, I got some stuff going on. Can you be aware for me? They said, yes, we'll keep an eye on you. Whether you're sparring with us or if you're sparring with someone else, if we see something wrong, we'll help you out. We'll be there for you. And that was so cool. You know, I paid for therapy before. I've seen a therapist. But then when you get on the mats with someone, therapists can't just start putting me in a rear naked choke, right? Therapist can't do that to me. But one of my buddies can. And they can also talk to me about my breath. They can also ask me about what I'm feeling.

 

00:16:24    DANNY JOSEPH

Are there women in jujitsu too? Is that common or is that? I don't know. At my gym,

 

00:16:29    COURTNEY MULHURN

my gym, there's an all -female class. They've experienced any sort of abuse, physical, sexual abuse, whatever trauma it is that they do not want a male around them in that capacity. There's an all -women's class, which is cool. So they're protected there. They're on a whole different mat. But then we do have mixed -gender classes where obviously any woman can jump on the mat and roll with us. And again, different people have different boundaries. And so there's that awareness that some feel totally comfortable getting after it and getting aggressive, and that's fine. It could be someone who are training for MMA. So like for myself, I didn't like getting hit. If we're talking about combat jiu -jitsu, if we're talking MMA. But I guess the point is having emotional intelligence enough to ask people what they're okay with or just reading the room. But yeah, our gym definitely has... a very large female -to -male ratio, maybe more so than other gyps. Okay.

 

00:17:22    DANNY JOSEPH

Because I got to say, I don't know some of these names you're using. I don't know what they are, but they don't sound very fun or, you know, I don't get choked out or anything.

 

00:17:33    COURTNEY MULHURN

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The big thing that I would say to anybody joining jiu -jitsu is be vocal about what you're comfortable with and what you're not comfortable with. It's okay to have boundaries on the mats.

 

00:17:45    DANNY JOSEPH

Definitely. And then if you're not super into that even, just kind of, you discussed in your book, just basic breath work will just be important. That's something you can do anywhere, anytime. It's just so important to work on the breath, as we know.

 

00:17:59    COURTNEY MULHURN

Definitely. Diaphragmatic breathing is, man, just like conscious breath effort. It's weird. It's awkward at times. It's difficult for a lot of us because we're so used to just being on autopilot. And then to say like, wait a minute, how do I put my breath in my stomach and not in my upper chest? Because once you do that, it activates the parasympathetic response. It activates down regulation of adrenaline. Like the adrenal glands actually secrete less adrenaline when you do that. And so what happens is you automatically start to become aware of different things, different tension in your body, pressure,

 

00:18:39    COURTNEY MULHURN

pain, discomfort, fatigue. We're good things. Happy things can come out too. It's not all dark and heavy, but it's just interesting how we're so caught up in our social media traffic, getting from point A to B, looking a certain way, having whatever it is in our life. And then you breathe and you slow things down. Your brain can then go into this kind of self -diagnostic mode where you just begin to naturally scan your body and you begin to feel grounded in the present. But if there's stuff that makes you uncomfortable, it's going to come up as well.

 

00:19:12    DANNY JOSEPH

Mm -hmm. Definitely. Okay, so you've got two books coming up here, Bridging Worlds and Motor Mind. Do you want to share a little bit about those books?

 

00:19:24    COURTNEY MULHURN

Yeah, so the Motor Mind one is creating analogies about the human brain in terms of a vehicle's engine. So it's supposed to discuss the neurosurgery of the brain in terms of the mechanics of the mind. That's kind of the concept there. So it should be a fun read that allows people to look at the brain not as just relational, not as just touchy feelings. So what's the science say about the neurocircuits and the components of the brain? And then Bridging World is about my story growing up in America as a first -generation child of Middle Eastern immigrants. So it has to do with shame, honor -based cultures and how they differentiate from guilt -based cultures. So an Eastern versus Western. kind of conflict of ideologies and how to navigate that.

 

00:20:13    DANNY JOSEPH

Very cool. Those sound like great reads. You have a diversified repertoire in your writing, so that's really, really cool. And then your website. So combatpsych .com. Very nicely done website. It has all your work on there. Other resources and tools. You've got downloads. which I think kind of just back to a small group, a lot of these are just really great discussion group resources that one can just have with maybe on a drill weekend or something just to kind of get that conversation going. So really great website there and links to your books.

 

00:20:57    COURTNEY MULHURN

Yeah, thanks for saying that. I appreciate the kind words. Yeah, it's all free for the most part. Books you can buy on Amazon or they can download a couple of them for free. on the website. But yeah, it's free stuff. So just grab it, grab whatever you want, use whatever you want. I paid a lot out of pocket for therapy, for a master's, for all that stuff. And I don't want other people to have to pay for it just because I don't want there to be a pain wall between a soldier not living their best life. So whatever you can use, whatever speaks to you and definitely use it. And I hope it helps. I'm going to upload self -assessment diagnostic in the next few days as well as a PDF. I just want to offer whatever tools that I got in life that carried me forward. I want soldiers especially to have that in anybody else.

 

00:21:42    DANNY JOSEPH

Yeah. And just overall resilience. That's what we want. We want to move forward. We want to grow as people and as military members. So CombatPsych .com for good resources there. And then what's next for you?

 

00:21:54    COURTNEY MULHURN

Definitely have those books I want to finish and a few more I'm building out the framework for. I will be working with the government on a new job pretty soon. Tuts. protecting our country i'm really proud of that but i'm motivated by the troops that i'm meeting and the folks especially here in san diego some of my good friends are just doing some amazing things i'm meeting some young guys in the buds pipeline or inspiring me they remind me of my soldiers in jiu -jitsu i'm just surrounded by a lot of a lot of veterans and you know just the community is so inspirational to me Again, I thought when I got out, I just go back into society and Charlie Mike, like I did before I joined. But now that I'm out, there's just something so near and dear to my heart when I can hang out with service members and veterans and whatnot. And so I just want to build a life working alongside them and also giving them tools and helping them become better.

 

00:22:46    DANNY JOSEPH

Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you for being here and for sharing your work and your thoughts. Very important topics. Just good to get these conversations going. It's important to keep up with our mental health and resilience in the military. And did you have any other final thoughts?

 

00:23:04    COURTNEY MULHURN

Again, I got this from J .P. Lane, who's a really amazing combat veteran. That you're worth it. He'd always say that to people, and I loved it. I love it how he says that. And I would say that to anybody who feels like they're struggling, who feels like they're stuck, you're worth self -enrichment, you're worth becoming your best self. Because the stronger you become as an individual, the stronger your unit will be. So invest in that. Whatever it is, look for those resources and tools. Go to my website. Go to other websites. Read books and grow yourself.

 

00:23:35    DANNY JOSEPH

All righty. Well, thank you for your time, Dan. Appreciate it.

 

00:23:39    Close

Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe and read the show on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an episode, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. And now, most importantly, to those currently out in the field, working with a partner nation's people or leadership to forward U .S. relations, thank you all for what you're doing. This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great episodes, 1CA Podcast.